Speculative Fiction
MA Thesis in Literary Studies: Literature, Culture and Society Graduate School for Humanities
Universiteit van Amsterdam Anna Holbrook
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Supervisor: Dr. Kristine Johanson Second reader: Dr. Anna Seidl
June 2018
Introduction: Pornified Culture and Feminist Speculative Fiction 1
Chapter One: Twentieth-Century Interventions 14
Chapter Two: To be Female is to be Alien: Awakening to a Pornified Culture 27
Chapter Three: Dystopian Realities in The Power 37
Conclusion 48
Introduction: Pornified Culture and Feminist Speculative Fiction Following the 2018 partial suffrage centenary in the UK, meaningful and affirmative contemplation of what the next century requires in order for women to meet full parity with men holds far more promise than the event’s momentary celebration. In the wake of
heightened public scrutiny of men’s sense of sexual entitlement in the form of the Weinstein scandal, the #metoo and #TimesUp movements, the spring 2018 exposé of the rampant sexual harassment at the President’s Club men-only charity event in London, and the revelation that Oxfam senior staff paid local women for sex after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti — to name but a few examples — the seeds of a revolution are being sown. This revolution is
challenging the deeply ingrained ideology which validates the inequality between women and men in the realm of sex, power, and relationships. Yet questioning how this resistance can be effectively cultivated is crucial in order to prevent this moment from becoming trivialised or transient. Viral campaigns have been criticised for their fleeting success: for example, the support of figures such as supermodel Cara Delevingne in #bringbackourgirls in 2015 on social networking sites appeared to encourage fashionable participation in ‘clicktivism’ rather than meaningful activism in response to the abduction of over two-thousand girls by Boko Haram (Shearlaw). In the West today, pornified mainstream culture represents the most inimical form of patriarchal control, a realm in which pernicious prescriptions of gender and power fester. This thesis argues that the strategies used by writers and producers within speculative fiction powerfully resist the harmful ramifications of Western pornified culture. In doing so, speculative fiction of the twenty-first century exposes the constructed and deeply unequal nature of our present reality, ultimately providing an important form of feminist activism necessary for the continuing struggle for equality.
The pornography industry has long been blamed for constructing women’s societal and cultural confinement owing to its justification and naturalisation of essentialist and unequal roles of men and women in the realm of sex, and by extension, society.
Pornography’s move from the margins to the mainstream in contemporary Western culture has allowed for deep-set gender inequality to intensify and consolidate, indicating that now — more than ever — is a powerful counter-narrative to porn required. The gender equality that various contemporary movements are pursuing is achievable in the foreseeable future if such a critical narrative to porn is constructed. This thesis argues that this
counter-narrative is visible within the study of literature, and specifically within the genre of speculative fiction in twenty-first-century American and British novels and visual media. Speculative fiction is commonly referred to as the genre of ideas: a genre that encompasses all that is other-worldly about a text, including science fiction narratives, alternative worlds or societies and non-human life forms. As an ideologically-based literature that provides access to the narrative of gender that contemporary pornified culture disseminates, feminist speculative fiction deconstructs, resists and re-defines the prescriptions of female sexuality by working to expose the constructed and deeply unequal nature of American and European society. The manifestations of pornified culture as laid out in this introduction — such as the pornographic lens — are resisted by the visual and narrative strategies employed in Under the
Skin (2013), the first series of Westworld (2016) and The Power (2016). This thesis argues
that these techniques — such as the alien cinematic gaze, the construction of artificial female subjectivity, and the imagining of a world in which the contemporary language of power is reversed — resist the pervasive influence of pornified culture upon gender equality today. Their strategies of resistance provoke a critical questioning of the problems of binary constructions of gender; of essentialist narratives of power; mechanisms of female objectification; and of the present condition of inequality as one directly inculcated by pornified contemporary culture.
Unless stated otherwise, I understand ‘pornography’ as mainstream visual material primary found on the Internet, as I believe it is this material that encompasses what is both most pervasive and most detrimental to contemporary women’s subjectivity and equality. I identify the elements of a pornified culture to which I refer throughout the body of the thesis to include: the infiltration of pornography into the mainstream of popular culture and its increasing influence in popular media, as visible in hyper-sexualised advertising, music videos and on self-promoting social media sites such as Twitter; pornography’s constant and deregulated availability owing to the shift in the way in which it is produced and consumed in the digital age; and the increasing conflation between images of sex produced by porn and the way in which sex is experienced in reality owing to its domination as an explicit educational tool for young people. I argue that pornified culture also further inculcates and naturalises rigid prescriptions of female sexuality which place women’s pleasure as secondary to that of men; denies women sexual subjectivity as objects of male desire and in servitude to an
‘insatiable’ male sex drive; suggests that inequality and even violence within sex is erotic; and posits that consent is negotiable.
Cultural pornification has led to the heightened influence of the pornographic lens, through which women’s sexual agency is rendered less available, and gender relations in the realm of sex in particular are obscured. Speculative literature and media reacts to
contemporary pornified culture by directly confronting the strategies that it employs to normalise and maintain gender inequality. This introduction further reflects upon the effects of contemporary pornified culture as the basis for the exploration of the reactionary position occupied by British and American speculative fiction in the twenty-first century.
The digital age has transformed the ways in which porn is consumed: its constant availability, accessibility and heightened anonymity has meant that the line between the marginal and the mainstream has become increasingly blurred. Pornhub, one of the most popular free websites, provides unmediated access to porn, with ‘eighty million visitors a day and more traffic than Pinterest, Tumblr or PayPal’, illustrating its no longer marginal, and highly influential global position (Jones). The ease of self-promotion on social media sites such as Twitter (which, unlike social-media counterparts such as Facebook, does not censor pornographic material) exemplifies this expansion of pornography’s influence in popular media (Holbrook, ‘Making the Center Visible’ 3). Indeed, the prevalence of social media sites and photo-sharing has lead to the rise in revenge porn, legally defined as ‘the sharing of private, often sexual or explicit, photos or videos, of another person with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress’ (Davies). The mainstreaming of porn culture is also evident in the pornographic content of music videos, that came under particular scrutiny in 2013 after Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ song and accompanying video were banned in over twenty British Student Unions (Lynskey). The lyrics of the song — ‘I hate these blurred lines/I know you want it’ — that denote a disturbing attitude towards sex and consent were reinforced by the uncensored music video, which features a topless model being pursued by three fully clothed male performers (Lynskey). Recent popular culture trends — as
exemplified by the worldwide interest in Fifty Shades of Grey (2011-2018) and its portrayal of BDSM sex — further illustrate the mainstreaming of content that normalises pornographic or rough sex. Pornography’s mainstream status is also exemplified by the vast number of celebrities, such as Kim Kardashian, who have become famous for their sex tapes. What is
insidious about such trends is the fact that the cultural mainstreaming of pornography has meant that its damaging notions of sex, intimacy, gender and power are further embedded and thus become more difficult to critique.
As a result, in contemporary Western cultures, sex has become almost synonymous with porn. Despite the radical nature of this claim, the ramifications of the dramatic
pornification of culture have undoubtedly problematised the ability to distinguish between ‘real sex’ and the sex that is performed in mainstream material. For example, online pornography has increasingly become the principal means by which young people in
particular are educated about sex, and perceive sexual acts to be performed: a 2016 survey of one thousand and one eleven to sixteen year-olds in Britain found that of roughly half who had seen pornography, fifty-three percent of boys and thirty-nine percent of girls said it was ‘realistic’ (Jones). The overwhelming presence of pornography online has meant that its exposure to young people is often not intentional: in a 2008 survey, ‘ninety-three percent of male college students and sixty-two percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were eighteen. Many females, in particular, weren’t seeking it out’ (Jones). A disturbing entry from British feminist Laura Bates’ published compilation of her blog the ‘Everyday Sexism Project’ evidences the anxiety regarding the confusion between pornographic material and the anticipation of sex itself:
I am 13 and I am so scared to have sex it makes me cry nearly every day. We had sex education in Year 6 and I felt fine about it, but now some of the boys at school keep sending us these videos of sex which are much worse than what we learned about and it looks so horrible and like it hurts, and at night I get really scared that one day I will have to do it. (Bates)
This quotation well illustrates the influence of pornography on children and young people, shaping ‘how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by extension, their ideas about masculinity, femininity, intimacy and power’ (Jones). The speculative fiction texts which I examine provide a new discourse of sex and power to counter the pervasive influence of pornified culture.
Although the correlation between watching habits and young people’s sexual
into behaviour within real sexual relationships. Maggie Jones interviewed American
adolescents about their online porn habits and ideas about sex, finding that many use videos as ‘sources for ideas for future sex positions with future girlfriends…From porn, [they learnt] that guys need to be buff and dominant in bed…[girls] are turned on by pretty much
everything a confident guy does’ (Jones). Such ideas are shown to both produce anxiety in young boys about their sexual performance, and shape how girls and women are thought about as objects in servitude to male desire. The Indiana University national survey of teenagers found that one-sixth of boys said they had ejaculated on someone’s face or choked a sex partner, suggesting that pornographic material is producing the motivation for young people to engage in sex acts that eroticise inequality and degradation (Jones). Westworld in
particular employs the speculative genre to interrogate the commodification of desire within a capitalist, pornified culture.
The surviving taboo that restricts an open conversation about pornography and sex consolidates the industry’s monopolisation of this realm as the only means by which young people are ‘educated’ explicitly about sex. The conflict between a distinct lack of an open 1
national conversation in Western societies, strict regulation and moral revulsion towards sex, in stark contrast to its idealisation, celebration of sex and mainstreaming of porn culture are indicative of the complex relationship between sexuality and anti-sexuality that pervades Western society (Holbrook, ‘Making the Center Visible’ 2). Indeed, pornography’s seemingly effortless move into the mainstream suggests that its entrenched sexism and racism has been further absolved from criticism. A neo-liberal global culture is one that must be understood in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept of neoliberal governmentality as,‘a “day-to-day” organising of people’s behaviour “at a distance”’: involving a new sexual contract in which freedoms and opportunities in education, employment and realm of sex are offered alongside stifling social conservatism (Vintges 132). In the context of neo-liberalism, cultural
pornification has concealed the ‘changing regime of sexuality’: reinforcing the heterosexual matrix by portraying heterosexuality as a natural state rather than an institution that
disempowers all women — and indeed men — of all sexualities, ‘that has had to be imposed, managed, organised, propagandised, and maintained by force’ (McRobbie, ‘Pornographic
In a 2016 study of seventy-two American high schoolers ages sixteen and seventeen, teenagers
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reported that porn was their primary source for information about sex — ‘more than friends, siblings, schools or parents’ (Jones).
Permutations’ 230; Rich 238). The pairing of neo-liberalism and cultural pornification further prohibits an open conversation regarding what the constant availability and normalisation of pornography means for sex, sexuality and relationships. Owing to the role of the pornography industry as a major source of both sex entertainment and education, the powerful counter narrative that is provided by contemporary speculative fiction is pivotal to the quest for gender equality.
The continual policing and legislative regulation of sex and sexuality illustrate the reflection of social anxieties in sexual life and behaviour. Historical strict regulation of
homosexuality, for example, is grounded in the longstanding association of gay male sex with passivity, promiscuity and — following the discourse surrounding the AIDS crisis of the 1980s — disease (Holbrook, ‘Making the Center Visible’ 2; Bersani 211). Western society’s complex and fluctuating perceptions of what is considered to be ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ sex refute the claim that pornography is merely a fictive reflection of a marginal proportion of an otherwise normal form of human behaviour: a particularly radical argument which in its indictment of sex as inherently problematic, denies the positive comprehension of sex as a natural expression of love and affection between people (Holbrook, ‘Making the Center Visible’ 2). Despite its radical nature, the argument that human sexuality is intrinsically aversive pinpoints the deep complexity of the divisive debate that became manifest in the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘porn wars’ between ‘sex-positive feminists’ and ‘anti-porn feminists’ regarding pornography and its role in the emancipation of women in society. A prominent voice within this debate was that of Gayle Rubin, whose ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ proceeded the contentious 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality in New York. Rubin’s claim that the anti-pornography stance is profoundly ‘anti-sexual’ became one of the position’s most prominent criticisms, often denounced for promoting a kind of ‘propaganda’ that ‘recreates a very conservative sexual morality…
[encouraging] opposition to pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, all erotic variation, sex education, abortion, and contraception’ (Rubin 166).
However, challenging the pornography industry’s domination of the cultural mainstream is not anti-sexual, but instead an affirmative reclaiming of a more expansive definition of the erotic that regains the separation between porn and sex. As I argue above, the ability to distinguish between the two has been lost in the pornification of culture.
Consequently, my argument does not intend to criticise pornography’s sexual explicitness, or the fact that its material is designed for masturbation, but instead argues that its pervasiveness evades effective critique of the complexity and ambiguity of the core of sexuality in which the very real social oppression of women is rooted.
My use of the term ‘pornographic lens’ refers not only to the active heterosexual, male gaze that is inherently assumed in the consumption of porn, but also to the fact that pornography has become the lens through which sex, relationships and gender roles are viewed and defined. Film theorist Laura Mulvey’s influential concept of the male gaze as discussed in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ — one which the analyses of my case studies draw upon — illustrates the way in which patriarchal structures have influenced the consumption of film narratives. The insidious coding of ‘the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’ through the construction of women as objects of the inherent male gaze is able to take root not only within popular cinema but also in public discourse and daily life owing to the pornographic lens which maintains the representation of woman as signifier of the male other: the ‘bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning’ (Mulvey 63, 58). Women in particular are determined by their sexual attractiveness and availability in alignment with therigid and restrictive prescriptions of female sexuality — as outlined on page two — that are reinforced and naturalised in mainstream pornography. Indeed, as Timo Jütten illustrates, ‘pornography stakes a strong claim to show “the truth about sex”’, not merely regarding the mechanics of sex acts, but through the ‘stories that porn tells’:
particularly exemplified by ‘amateur’ or ‘castings’ categories, which primarily perpetuate the notion that ‘all women can be talked into sex…regardless of what they initially say’ (45, 46). The fact that these troubling narratives within pornography — that violence in intimate relationships is normal, that consent is negotiable or that inequality is desirable or erotic, to name but a few — are presented as indisputable ‘truths’ highlights the abilityof the
pornographic lens to obscure our ability to question, challenge and deconstruct these claims. The perception of pornography as an accessible form of reality endows its content with a sense of ‘truth’ that a film which features sex, for example, would not engender. As I will further elucidate, the critique of pornography’s claims becomes further problematised owing to its status as a constitutive speech act.Speculative fiction employs literary strategies such as the use of narrative framing to make explicit the agendas that shape societal understandings
of gender. For example, as Chapter Three discusses, the framing of, and multiple narrative forms within the novel The Power evokes critical consideration of the construction of narratives.
The adoption of the pornographic lens by the mainstream of Western culture in accompaniment to cultural pornification has further naturalised the sexual objectification of women, owing to the fact that pornography is the principal media form that ‘constructs and disseminates the social meaning that characterise women as sex objects’ (Jütten 43). The concept of sexual objectification is central to feminist social criticism, and it has been defined by various figures including Catherine MacKinnon, Martha Nussbaum and more recently Timo Jütten. In contrast to Nussbaum’s non-moralised definition of the concept as ‘the seeing and/or treating of someone as an object’, I consider the ‘imposition’ account as defined by MacKinnon and developed by Jütten, that maintains that ‘the imposition of…social meaning on women is a harm and wrong in itself, even if it does not lead to actual
instrumentalisation’ (Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’ 251; Jütten 29). This understanding of sexual objectification maintains that objectification is always wrong, thus compelling a more nuanced interrogation into the social processes through which meanings are imposed on women’s bodies that make instrumentalisation possible in the first place (Jütten 28). The texts on which this thesis focuses employ techniques, such as mis-en-scene, the cinematic gaze, narrative form, and evoke language and imagery specific to the speculative genre, to interrogate the process of how these social meanings are constructed and imposed upon bodies.
Pornified Western culture has become one out of which women and girls in particular are unable to opt out in the light of the contemporary shift towards post-feminism: an
ideology hinged upon the notion that gender equality has been achieved, resulting in the active unravelling of the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s (McRobbie, ‘Post-Feminism’ 255). Widespreadacclaim of projects such as ‘Everyday Sexism’ illustrates progress, whilst also emphasising the continuing relevance of the feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’: popularised by the second-wave feminist movement of the l960s and 1970s. Post-feminism dismantles the principal that ‘the personal is political’ — that women are collectively held back by structural inequalities and patriarchal culture — by instead positing that gender equality has been reached, ‘seek[ing] to persuade us that women are being held back not by
patriarchal capitalism or institutionalised sexism, but by their own lack of confidence’ (Gill, ‘Post-Feminism’ 3). The term has primarily been used to describe the attitudes of young women, who are thought to have benefited from progressions in inequality within education, employment and family planning, for example. The notable resurgence in the popularity and interest in feminism that has taken place internationally in recent years has been influenced by the projection of the feminist identity as fashionable: one with a social-media based, celebrity endorsed presence led by icons of contemporary popular culture such as Beyoncé, and popularised by high-street clothing lines that proclaim on T-shirts that ‘the future is female’. Without sweepingly dismissing the affirmation of the pursuit for gender equality and the activist potential therein, the visible interest in feminism must not be evidenced as proof for the non-existence of an anti-feminist or regressive post-feminist culture: in fact, elements of contemporary mainstream feminist culture should be considered to be profoundly shaped by, and aligned with post-feminist principals (Gill, ‘Post-Feminism’ 2). Factors such as the misleading lenses of choice and consent; new definitions of femininity; and conventional sexual objectification of women cloaked in the suggestion of agency and empowerment, all problematise the ability of women to opt-out of pornified capitalist culture.
Post-feminism helps to account for the difficulty in challenging the sex industry, as the lenses of choice and consent obscure unequal gender relations. Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill critique the post-feminism that pervades popular culture and reinforces the structures of a pornified society that are outlined above, highlighting the urgency of confronting post-feminist discourse that consolidates a new femininity organised around claims of autonomy and sexual confidence (Gill, ‘From Sexual Objectification’ 103). Gill further suggests that there has been a shift from sexual objectification to sexual
subjectification in the construction of femininity in popular culture, taking the form of ‘objectification in a new and even more pernicious guise’ (‘From Sexual Objectification’ 105). The process of subjectification in which sexual objectification is willingly carried out by assertive female subjects has therefore become increasingly difficult to challenge and resist. Sexual subjectification is encouraged in Sheryl Sandberg’s self-proclaimed feminist book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013), that actively encourages women to exploit their own sexual attractiveness in order to succeed in the realm of the workplace: ‘I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to its biased
rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable
end.’ (Sandberg 48). Existing feminist discourse in popular culture and academia demands revision in order to effectively challenge this change in attitudes towards feminism and sexuality in contemporary hyper-sexualised culture as an alternative for girls and women who are bombarded with images of compulsory sexual agency in advertisements, social media and popular culture. The speculative fiction that this thesis examines resists post-feminist
discourse, using the genre to expose and refute feminism’s construction as dated, inessential, and anti-male.
Deliberately playing with one’s sexual power may indeed be experienced by women to be empowering. However, the prevalence of sexist social meanings such as the association of women’s bodies with sexual availability and violability, renders unstable the voluntary nature of choice and consent: ‘imposed social meanings may undermine [women’s] status as autonomous self-presenters who have equal social standing to men, regardless of the
voluntariness of their own choices’ (Jütten 49). In A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s
Freedom Practices in World Perspective, Karen Vintges also claims that there is a new kind
of sexualisation of women and girls in mainstream popular media, as neo-liberalism converges with older features of femininity, ‘culminating in a new dominant model of womanhood’ (133). This distinctive moment — in which the pornification of society has ‘dramatically increased intensity and extensiveness of hostile surveillance of women’s bodies and psyche’ — has been intensified and further codified owing to ‘notions of choice, agency and autonomy [becoming] more central’ (Vintges 134). In this way, notions of consent and choice are questionable lenses through which the influence of the pornography industry may be judged: sexual objectification, achieved most clearly through porn, severely limits
women’s ability for agency, autonomy and ultimately the potential to be equal to men. A.W. Eaton’s article ‘Feminist Pornography’ addresses the increased availability of feminist pornography as a potentially subversive space to express and promote a positive and accurate form of sex. Feminist pornography is suggested to be a strategy of resistance against the ‘collective erotic taste’ — which, as MacKinnon argues, eroticises inequality — which has been established by its dominant mode of representation by mainstream heterosexual porn (Eaton 244). By defining what constitutes feminist pornography — for example the presentation of women as subjects rather than objects of desire and pleasure — Eaton argues
that feminists should embrace forms of pornography that serve to re-shape erotic taste in the direction of gender equality (256). The existence of many more opportunities for feminist porn is a positive development in that it effectively counters the suggestion that to enjoy sexually explicit material is anti-feminist and anti-feminine:self-knowledge and pleasure should unquestionably be actively encouraged, following its long history of denial and taboo for women in particular. However feminist porn does not deconstruct the longstanding and pervasive prescriptions of female sexuality, and overlooks the root of what drives the production of, and demand for mainstream material. New narratives of authentic female sexuality are not provided solely by the pornographic realm. Crucially, it is within the genre of speculative fiction that writers and producers challenge to the complex roots of the ideology of sex itself.
The rigid gender order of today has become slowly but surely naturalised in its claim to universal legitimacy. The power of literature to expose and question the social structures on which gender inequality is based is rooted in its ability to posit an alternative vision of social reality. Writers and producers are therefore with a unique potential to reclaim an eroticism so limited by pornography, and thereby shake the foundations of what frames and maintains gender inequality. Twentieth-century feminists such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich promote erotic desire as a creative force for revolutionary change, challenging the way in which its representation in popular culture limits the erotic as a source of authentic female power and comradeship (Rich 239). Both writers understand sex and the erotic as concepts that must be expanded and redefined to encompass ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual’ in order to pose a meaningful, inclusive women-orientated threat to an anti-erotic, patriarchal society (Lorde 341). For lack of space, I primarily refer to the sexual objectification of women in the context of gender inequality. However, my thesis strives to maintain an intersectional perspective, recognising that gender is a single axis of oppression, and one shaped by its intersections with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability. The expansion of the erotic away from the heteronormative and racially-prejudiced focus of mainstream pornography is crucial in order to recognise the countless complexities that make up erotic identities, and envisage a post-gender discourse that eliminates the need for
categorisation. Although identity politics is problematic in that it maintains binary structures by proliferating the importance of social categories, and maintains the essential ideas of
identity that lie behind them, it remains that sex and sexuality in particular are classified and policed by both societal institutions and public discourse: it is arguably not the borders that are problematic, but the forces that govern them.
Literature’s ability to challenge the way in which we live is an ongoing process, one which disrupts the continually fluctuating structures and narratives constitutive of society. The clear renaissance in speculative fiction in both literary publication and visual production for example, Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), The Book of Strange New Things (2014), and the televised series of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), suggests that writers and producers working in this genre provide an answer to the pertinent question of how to build on the emerging feminist uprising. Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex underlined the importance of developing new myths for women as ‘subjects on the move’: a position that Vintges maintains, arguing the creation of new myths and narratives of female subjectivity and sexuality is vital in order to change the status of women in society (Vintges 11).
Historically, speculative fiction, like other genres, has been dominated by white men in both creation and consumption, in which women are continually othered as projections of
heterosexual male fantasies: a trend exhibited in the recently released Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by the character of Joi, the protagonist’s hologram girlfriend. As Chapter One argues, speculative fiction’s antecedent androcentrism makes it a potentially subversive and
important space for feminist resistance.
This exclusion of women from speculative fictions in itself exposes the troubling nature of women’s social position today. My thesis argues that writers and producers within speculative fiction resist and re-define the prescriptions of female sexuality of an increasingly ‘pornified’ culture by exposing the constructed and deeply unequal nature of our present reality. I focus on case studies of British and American texts that have been published in recent years to examine how writers and producers counteract post-feminist discourse and respond to the debate surrounding sex and sexuality in relation to the construction of women in society.
Chapter One argues that the twentieth century texts written by Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, and Octavia Butler establish the narrative strategies of resistance with which texts of the twenty-first century engage in relation to pornification of culture. Their
ground in which interrogate female sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality and constructions of gender. Such writers set the stage for an analysis of contemporary texts that develop the conversation through which societal change evolves. The succeeding chapters provide case studies of twenty-first century texts and analyse how they engage with the questioning of women’s representation and dominant narratives of sexuality specifically in relation to the elements of today’s pornified culture. Chapter Two examines the science fiction narratives of television series Westworld (2016) and Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin (2013) to argue that female-gendered, non-human life forms are used to expose the relationship between sex and violence, and interrogate what it means to be a human female through the process of construction and becoming. I will focus on Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016) in Chapter Three in order to argue that authors re-write codified narratives in order to rework female sexuality from its foundations, reinforcing the notion that a new social order must be grounded in new narratives and myths of womanhood and sexuality, and encouraging a critical consumption of naturalised narratives of gender.
Chapter One
Twentieth Century Interventions
In both its construction and consumption, speculative fiction has historically been associated with white men. Texts such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), The New Adam (1939) by Stanley Weinbaum, and 1970s and 1980s science fiction blockbusters such as Star Wars (1977), are examples of such white, male dominant excursions into patriarchal futures and universes. Visions of alternate universes, dystopian futures, catastrophic apocalypses and artificial intelligence have been overwhelmingly characterised by a pervasive homogeneity that betrays a perpetual anxiety towards otherness: those who are perceived to lie outside of the narrow and rigid confines of white middle class, heterosexual masculinity. Science fiction in particular interrogates what it means to be human, traditionally ‘offer[ing] itself as the universal expression of a homogenous “human nature’’’ (Hollinger 125). The displacement of women as men’s other — as projections of heterosexual male desire possessing little or no agency or subjectivity — insidiously renders the female experience invisible and invalid: present merely in servitude to the stories of men. Both this generic and inter-narrative exclusion from visions of the future betray deeply unequal sociocultural understandings of gender. Identifying the clear ostracisation of positive and female-orientatednarratives, writers of the twentieth century intervened in speculative fiction in order to question the way in which women are represented in literature and popular culture, and interrogate white, male-dominant narratives and constructions.
I argue that authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter and Octavia Butler were key initiators of the feminist excursion into speculative fiction, exemplifying a literature that became actively engaged with questions of female sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality and constructions of gender. Critically acclaimed texts such as Le Guin’s The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969), Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), and Butler’s Bloodchild (1995), are
classic works with which texts of the twenty-first century are in conversation, providing the groundwork for writers who continue to pursue the equal representation and social position of women. This chapter argues that the deconstruction of gender in relation to sex and power within these specific texts is the baseline from which to examine the resistance of twenty-first century speculative fiction to the pornification of contemporary British and American culture.
I have determined the sequence and weighting of my discussion of each text according to its relevance to my case studies of Westworld, Under the Skin and The Power, and in relation to their engagement with the genre in the context of twenty-first century cultural pornification. Le Guin’s text sets up the chapter just as it paved the way for feminist gender questioning speculative fiction in the twentieth century. Her interrogation of the function of art itself is a concept that runs throughout the thesis. Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ uses language, symbolic imagery and narrative form and construction to posit new notions of sex and subjectivity, confronts pornographic constructions of women in writings by men, and makes explicit the insidious implications of the male gaze as a patriarchal tool. Owing to these ideas being particularly relevant to the twenty-first century texts, I focus most substantially upon ‘The Bloody Chamber’. Through language and genre, Butler reworks narratives of essential biological gender difference, a strategywhich Naomi Alderman employs in The Power.
Although Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein established an important precedent for female-authored speculative fiction, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s in America when writers such as Francis Stevens and C. L. Moore set the stage for the eruption of feminist speculative fiction that took place in the 1970s (Hollinger 128). Coding
speculative fiction’s central elements of science, technology and exploration as masculine has lead to the essentialist suggestion that femininity is ‘naturally’ excluded from the genre. However, speculative fiction provides fertile ground for the interrogation of notions of gender, and in particular, human sexuality, as Wendy Pearson highlights: ‘sexuality is not merely peripheral, but absolutely central to the potential futures we may invent, as well as to our reflections on the present’ (159). The exposure of sex as a fluctuating and socially constructed concept is controversial owing to its cultural entrenchment as a behaviour governed by inherent human instinct. Pearson elaborates on this notion, highlighting the fact that for many, ‘sexuality — and in particular heterosexuality — can be envisioned only within the category of the “natural”’, rather than as an idea that is continually under societal surveillance and control (149). Indeed, the ‘potential for perversity’ that lies within the desires and behaviour that sex instigates are ‘too frightening to contemplate’, resulting in the relegation of the discourse of sex and sexuality to that of the biological drive: animalistic and instinctive rather than constructed and malleable (Pearson 149). Working within a
narratives and structures that codify sexuality as natural, and gender as fixed, revealing perceptions of sex and sexuality to be deeply informed by constructed narratives of gender inequality.
John Frow posits the pertinent question of who is able to participate within, and patrol the boundaries of, generic categories that actively ‘generate and shape [our] knowledge of the world’ through the naturalising of a particular perspective, and the marginalisation of others (ix). Through the effects of ‘reality and truth’ that genres create, the ideologically saturated structures that are central to the way in which the world is understood, and social meanings are formed, are concealed(Frow 19). The disruption of conventional narratives in speculative fiction is rooted in the exposure of their structures not as natural and ingrained but as
propagated and controlled. Women working in speculative fiction are therefore able to challenge the imperceptible mechanisms of power through which our own understandings of gender are constituted: disrupting the cultural narratives on which the patriarchy is built and maintained from within. Socialist feminism of the 1980s, namely the work of Donna
Haraway, combines science and feminism to project a new socialist feminist vision.
Haraway’s pivotal ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984) argues for the rejection of an essentialist and binary conception of gender, presenting the cyborg as a new way of relating to a different, conceptual means of thinking about bodies, and attaching new meanings to them.Although rooted in specific issues of the 1980s, Haraway’s text is key in the continuing feminist effort to collapse rigid dualist notions of gender in the move towards a post-gender world.
Haraway’s cyborg has been central to the recent emergence of post-humanism. Its focus on corporeality — on bodies that are produced by ‘the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences’ —
interrogates the way in which developments in technology and science are shaping the lives of women in the context of contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality (Halberstam & Livingston 3).
Despite the complex and seemingly abstract nature of Haraway’s writing, her text is grounded in concrete social issues that serve to remind the reader of what is at stake, such as reproductive rights and the collapse of the welfare state. Speculative fiction in particular has often been disregarded as a low art form, detached from the politics of the present (Gavaler & Johnson). However, its unique deconstructive ability allows writers to powerfully question
the contemporary moment. Indeed, radical deconstruction is a prerequisite to a restructuring of society based not on exploitation, domination and individualism, but on equality and collectivism. Published before both The Bloody Chamber and Bloodchild in 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness set in motion the interrogation of the concepts of gender and of sexuality as a classic feminist ‘thought-experiment’ (Le Guin xv). Le Guin deconstructs the notion of gender inequality by exploring the subversive potential of an androgynous society, in which the asexual, androgynous inhabitants of Gethen only experience sexuality during the ‘kemmer’ period, when they can become either male or female and bear children. Rogers Brubaker’s Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled
Identities (2016) discusses the fruitfulness of thinking with ‘trans’, though which to view the
fluidity of racial and sexual identification. Distinguishing three types of trans, ‘the trans of between’ is defined as ‘defining oneself with reference to the two established categories, without belonging entirely or unambiguously to either one, and without moving definitively from one to the other’, a status exemplified by androgyny (Brubaker 10). Le Guin’s
androgynous society disrupts the legibility of gender by establishing a location between the orthodox categories of male and female, therefore problematising any attempt to designate values or behaviours to the male or the female body. Left Hand has since been criticised for its use of the masculine pronoun to refer to the Gethenians, thus allowing the society to be read as all male: ‘a safe trip into androgyny and back, from a conventionally male
viewpoint’ (Le Guin qtd in Merrick 247). However, Le Guin’s radical deconstruction of gender was one of the very first, paving the way for the discussions and texts that continued in her wake.
Thinking about gender specifically in relation to pornography, sex, violence and power, the symbolic form of the fairy tale allows Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to create new foundational narratives of sex and subjectivity: ‘extract[ing] the latent content from the traditional stories and [using] it as the beginnings of new stories’ (Simpson vii). The description of fairy tales as ‘the science fiction of the past’ suggests a societal re-imagining by looking back, deconstructing the structures of sexual inequality that permeate fairy tales (Simpson ix). The central ideas of the eponymous first tale powerfully explore inequality and objectification within the fairy tale, pornographic male constructions of femininity and sex, and the destructive ramifications of the male gaze upon female subjectivity. ‘The Bloody
Chamber’ draws on the Bluebeard tale from what is often acknowledged to be the original 1697 collection of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, in which Bluebeard brutally kills his wives after they defy his order to keep out of the chamber where his past brides’ corpses lie. In Carter’s version, the Marquis’ — a reference to the libertine, Marquis de Sade — newest bride is the unnamed first person narrator. The inequality between the narrator and the
Marquis permeates all aspects of the tale. He ominously looms over her in wealth, ‘the richest man in France’ unlike ‘the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery…to pay the fees at the Conservatoire’; age,‘I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world’ whereas ‘He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane’, and physical build: ‘a huge man, an enormous man’ (Carter 9, 4, 3, 6). His face, which is ‘plain’ and ‘like a mask’ endows him with a nondescript identity: one which suggests his
personification of patriarchy, as a ‘monstrous presence…gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us…the presence that…always subtly oppressed me’ (3, 17).
Similarly, the narrator remains unnamed, providing her with an anonymity that gives the tale a universal quality: a simulacrum of a wider cultural picture of inequality and dominance.
Demystification — of foundational literary narratives, of pornography — is presented as the key to unlocking the lies of history that, in their association with indisputable fact, are often unchallenged. The disturbing disparity that exists between the narrator and the Marquis’ experience not only in marriage, but in sexual, pornographic knowledge makes explicit the pornographic construction of women by men, and the sexual inequality that such powerfully gendered imagery produces. The Marquis parades such knowledge in his library of sadistic pornography, and the bloody chamber itself, a ‘little museum of his perversity’, filled with instruments of torture, and the bodies of mutilated women (27). In an explicit scene in which the narrator’s vulnerability is signified in the imbalance between ‘the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb’, standing fully clothed ‘in his London tailoring’ whereas she is stripped, ‘bare as a lamb chop’, illustrates the moment as the ‘most pornographic of all confrontations’: emphasising her status as a passive object to be inspected and consumed, as the imagery of food and raw meat stress: like ‘cuts on the slab’ she is repeatedly examined (11, 6). Here Carter points to pornography’s violence as constitutive of such objectification and inequality, and argues that pornography, once demystified, reveals the structures that maintain inequality between women and men. History has handed down through the ages
successive mythologies which have served to mystify the narratives upon which our society is based. The economic discourse produced by the imagery of money and transaction as he, her ‘purchaser’, ‘unwrapped his bargain’ in a ‘ritual from the brothel’, commodifies the narrator, turning her into chattel (6). The association of ‘his wedding gift…a choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’ brings to the foreground the crucial importance that wealth, possessions and power play in a capitalist society, revealing those underlying assumptions of a bourgeois culture which equate women with possession, object and purity (6). Carter therefore exposes the foundation upon which capitalist
patriarchal culture is based: domination. The deconstruction of pornography, and of deeply ingrained narratives of power, sex and gender, is critically important for speculative fiction texts of the twenty-first century which resist narratives of domination in the context of cultural pornification and post-feminist notions of female sexual agency.
Diverging from the original tales, the retrospective, first-person narration of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ poses a resistance to the protagonist’s subordination as the Marquis’ newly acquired bride by endowing her with omnipotence as the story’s narrator: the definer, rather than the defined. Perrault’s original tale is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, whose own subjectivity mediates the reader’s perception of the story and its characters. Conscious narrative moments in Carter’s text — for example, ‘that night at the opera comes back to me even now…the white dress; the frail child within it’ — makes textual construction clear through the explicit reference to the narrator’s memory, thus refuting the notion of truth to which traditional tales make claim in the concealment of the narrator’s authoritative position (6). Traditional fairy tales deny the active constitution of the very world that it appears to reflect as natural, subsequently shielding its perspective from criticism. By making manifest the latent content of the tales that are embedded in the desire to dominate and
objectify women, Carter illustrates values such as purity, asexuality and vulnerability to be male constructions. The shift in narration to first-person not only endows the female protagonist with agency and narrative subjectivity, but also allows her to defy the male attempt to describe and, in doing so, prescribe her identity: ultimately to disempower the Marquis through her ability to define. In meeting his death, the Marquis is stripped of his power and of his claim to manhood, as ‘impotent at the last’, ‘the puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed…saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had
ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves’ (40). The imagery of puppetry highlights the performance of gender as one dictated by patriarchal definitions of masculinity and femininity. The ultimate resurrection of the dolls who begin to ‘live for themselves’ points to the potential for a discovery of empowering female subjectivity within subversive narratives of gender, and the substantial threat that they pose to the potency of male domination.
The conclusion of the tale in which the Marquis is shot through the head with an ‘irreproachable bullet’ by the protagonist’s mother presents feminist literature as able to subvert conventional patriarchal narratives, and create new stories that are ‘fired by the conviction that…human beings are capable of change’ (Carter 41; Simpson xii). Art within ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is revealed to entrap and bind women in male projections, eliminating all sense of selfhood. Once she is wed to the Marquis, she joins the ‘gallery of beautiful women’, likened to ‘the living image of an etching by Rops’, which echoes the fate of his past wife, who ‘had been a barmaid in a cafe in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush’ (Carter 5, 11, 5). Male artistic representations of women are suggested to capture women in an objectified male gaze, and contain them in images like etchings and paintings that eradicate their individual subjectivity, ceasing to be a ‘barmaid in a cafe’ to instead be exposed, objectified and confined to male-defined representation. Similarly, the propulsion of the conventional plot progression of romance narratives and fairy tales that dictates marriage, pregnancy and motherhood, repeatedly condemns women to a fate of exile and isolation — ‘into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it — that, henceforth, I would always be lonely’; boredom: ‘what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me?’; and entrapment: ‘there was nowhere to go’ (7, 12); and ultimately death, as the gruesome fates of the Marquis’ past wives reveal. The epic characterisation of the mother, a ‘wild thing’ who storms the castle with hair like a ‘white mane’ and possesses a mythic status having previously ‘disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi’, is emblematic of the story’s progressive creation of new subjective narratives that reinvent the myths of women from their foundations (40, 41). Here Carter emphasises the alternative potential of art to both demystify and liberate by creating new discourses of femininity that counter ideas of female purity, passivity and objectification to project new
images of courage, agency and empowerment. By creating new stories, Carterhighlights the dual function of art and the necessity of questioning narrative construction and mediation. The creation of new stories within the fairy tale genre, imagery of puppetry and the use of first person narration in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ compels readers to become critically engaged with narratives of domination within society. The reader’s rejection of this responsibility will ultimately constitute our own confinement, as we remain puppets playing out a preordained fate.
The fairy tale’s use of symbolism proves to be well suited for the exploration of the destructive effects of the male gaze: an instrument of patriarchal rule. The recurring motif of mirrors instills a sense of constant surveillance and refraction, that as the passive object of his gaze — ‘I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh’ — codes her, in Mulvey’s terms, as a woman who connotes a
‘to-be-looked-at-ness’: subjected to a controlling, invasive and possessive act of sexual
objectification through sight (Carter 6, Mulvey 61). The fact that it is the marital bed that is ‘surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of contorted gold’ references the scopophilic, pornographic lens through which her body is coded for male visual sexual pleasure (Carter 10). The internalised narration allows for an insight into the ramifications upon the protagonist as the passive object of the male gaze, as his domination of her results in her humiliation: ‘the blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there’, and an uneasy and disconcerting sense of arousal accompanied by disgust as she simultaneously experiences ‘a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh’: ‘I longed for him. And he disgusted me’ (10, 11). To be watched in such a dominating and degrading manner problematises her own sense of sexual subjectivity, making clear the ramifications of the male gaze that inculcates patriarchal dominance both physically and psychologically.
Most insidiously, it becomes clear that it is through the pornographic, male lens that the narrator begins to see herself, producing a profound sense of self-detachment that attests to the power of the gaze to define and to disfigure one’s identity. Her fear becomes located in fear of herself, as she ‘seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognised myself from his descriptions of me’, emphasising the power of the definer to mystify the self (17). Indeed, the fact that it is ‘in glancing away from him’ that she ‘caught
sight of myself in the mirror’, suggests that the patriarchal male gaze disrupts what Jacques Lacan describes as the mirror stage: ‘an essential moment in the act of intelligence’ (Carter 6; Lacan 94). Recognition of one’s self in a mirror constitutes a crucial development of self-identification, ‘namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’ (Lacan 95). As the narrator’s image is refracted through the Marquis’ gaze, her
identity is reconfigured, ‘I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire’, and objectified (Carter 6). The language and imagery of death that is associated with the instrument of the gaze, the Marquis’ eye — ‘his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me’ —signifies the fact that it is the male gaze that condemns women to death: nullifying her autonomy entirely (7). The mirrors in sexually explicit scenes serve to illustrate the way in which individual manifestations of objectification produce a ripple effect. The fact that ‘the young bride’ becomes a ‘multitude of girls…in the mirrors’ providing what the Maquis describes as a ‘whole harem for myself!’, suggests that her violent sexual experience is one that is reproduced dozens of times, as ‘a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides’ (10, 14). This dizzying sense of magnitude illustrates howexperiences of sexual objectification are reproduced and consolidated in their repetition: objectification of one leads to
objectification of the masses.That this objectification ‘impales’ emphasises its brutality: perforating all those it touches.
‘The Bloody Chamber’ is of clear relevance to the discussion of gender within the context of pornography, sex, power and gender in a twenty-first century context. The infiltration of pornography into the mainstream of Western culture makes the critical
interrogation of narrative construction of gender ever more urgent. Carter’s work emphasises speculative fiction as a subversive realm in which the demystification of patriarchal
narratives of domination and of the methods of their implementation opens up spaces in which to erode contemporary ideas of gender, and allows for new subjective art forms to flourish.
Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild is similarly invested in the deconstruction of specific narratives on which patriarchal rule is founded and sustained, such as the biological equation of women’s bodies with the discourse of docility and submissiveness that surrounds
backwards to foundational tales of the past, Butler’s short story, ‘Bloodchild’ interrogates existing discourses of the most ‘natural’ of human experience, such as childbirth, in order to delegitimise the regime of gender difference based on biological essentialism. By working in the speculative fiction genre, and specifically within the re-imagining of human society in an ‘alien’ world, Butler disrupts the conventions of the genre which traditionally projects heteronormative, masculine constructions of space exploration and empire, ‘which typically rely on a heteronormative imperial thrust’, arguing that ‘it wouldn’t be the British Empire in space, and it wouldn’t be Star Trek’ but instead ‘a story about paying the rent…who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a liveable space on a world not our own?’ (Thibodeau 263; Butler, ‘Bloodchild’31, 32). Butler here demonstrates that traditionally masculine science fiction narratives can be subverted in order to indicate ‘alternative constructions of hegemony and desire’, and expose narratives of gender difference, biological essentialism and generic conventions to be male constructions that render women’s bodies subordinate: under the control and surveillance of men (Thibodeau 267). The process of narrative subversion in ‘Bloodchild’ is accomplished by making undetectable constructions of difference visible. The term ‘queering’ is defined by Judith Butler as betraying what ought to remain concealed, a ‘question of what can or cannot be spoken, and what can or cannot be publicly exposed’ (Butler, Bodies that Matter, 124). As Thibodeau argues, ‘Bloodchild’ participates in the deconstructive process by ‘queering’ heteronormative structures that, in their claim to universality, problematise the expression of identities that defy conventional narratives of practises such as childbirth, heteronormative family structures and monogamous desire, for example. The ‘public exposure’ of such practises and values to be constructions reveals the anxiety to preserve such narratives as defining aspects of humanity.
‘Bloodchild’ imagines a community of ‘Terrans’ on a planet where the extraterrestrial species, ‘Tlic’ are indigenous. Gan — the human male narrator — is the ‘host’ who has been raised by a Tlic, T’Gatoi, to be implanted with her eggs. From the story’s first line, ‘my last night of childhood began with a visit home’, the narrative’s focus on the male human protagonist Gan’s coming-of-age is made clear (Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ 3).Departing from coming-of-age narratives which traditionally focus on male stories of adventure, an American sense of selfhood and social advancement, Gan’s development is centred around his growing
awareness of the fearful realities of childbirth: ‘how had he done it? How did anyone do it?’ (22). Gan’s traumatic experience as he watches a man give birth — ‘I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse…the whole procedure was wrong, alien’ — defamiliarises a process considered to be the most natural of the (female) human experience (16-17). In doing so, Butler interrogates the cultural tendency to associate characteristics, values and bodies with gender, to label and to naturalise ‘certain aspects of human nature and human experience as “essentially feminine” or as “essentially masculine”’ (Hollinger 130).Butler calls attention to Gan’s voyeuristic position, emphasising the power of watching over women’s bodies in contemporary society. Women’s reproductive function renders their bodies docile, under the surveillance and control of the state. Butler shows that the discourse surrounding reproduction and gender exacerbates essentialist ideas of biological difference, which go on to justify misogynistic frameworks of domination.
The reversal of conventional roles and behaviour in the implantation scene, in which the female penetrates Gan — ‘I undressed and lay down beside her…so easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine’ — and then promises to care for him and the young, ‘I won’t leave you…I’ll take care of you’, similarly challenges the readerly disposition to conflate sex with expectations of gender (Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ 27). Butler therefore challenges gender essentialism that is very much rooted in biological ideas of sex. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, ‘what needs to be changed are attitudes, beliefs, and values rather than the body itself’: the conflation of the cultural meanings that are assigned to women’s bodies with the body itself, such as passivity and dependency, legitimises the essentialism that produces inequality between women and men (17). Re-imagining pregnancy and childbirth as a male experience allows gender expectations to be reversed, for typically female roles to be enacted as inherent to the male experience, and thus reveals gender to be performative: the cultural expression of the male/female dichotomy that, in its repeated enactment, becomes coded into, and onto, bodies. I continue this
discussion further in Chapter Three.
Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ illustrates the way in which the alien body in feminist speculative fiction expands on Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, which argues that new bodies are required in order to detach established, sexist discourse from the body. The
description of T’Gatoi’s alien body is captivating and human-like, whilst simultaneously repellant and monstrous in its otherness; it is three meters long with ‘ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limb bones per segment…she seemed not only boneless, but
aquatic’ (Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ 9). This ambivalence regarding the way in which T’Gatoi’s body is perceived questions how meaning is designated to bodies. Similarly, in her definition of ‘Bloodchild’ as a ‘love story between two very different beings’, Butler challenges what is considered to be conventional or acceptable representations of love, especially within a narrative (30). Gan himself cannot resist attempting to define their ambivalent relationship, asking her ‘what are you?…what are we to you?’, illustrating the hazy concept of consent, mutuality and desire in their relationship (24). Butler both challenges the way in which we as readers have seemingly rigid yet obscure notions of what constitutes acceptable, or normative relationships, and also indicates the existence of a multiplicity of desire, and of forms of love. Through genre and language, Butler challenges the way in which representations of gender, love, sex — all of which fall into the categories of the natural, or ‘truth’ of human behaviour and emotion — are consumed. The mainstreaming of pornography today perpetuates
narratives of essential gender difference and powerful images of femininity, masculinity within sex and relationships. Carter and Butler employ the speculative genre to erode the foundational ideas on which inequality between the sexes is based: exemplifying the tools with which the dismantling of contemporary pornified culture is achieved today.
As Le Guin notes in her introduction, ‘science fiction is not predictive; it is
descriptive’: highlighting, as both Carter and Butler do, the investment of speculative fiction in the desire to represent the realities of the present world (xiv). Le Guin’s contradictory statement that, ‘I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth’ indicates to the problematic gap that lies between the ‘truth’ and its representation (xiv). As Carter implies in the dual and
contradictory functions of art which both liberates and holds women captive, aesthetic reproduction is here suggested to conceal the truth in a manner of creative artifice. Thinking about art and its representative ability is crucial in illustrating the power of images to shape identity, and to inform societal ideas about gender and sex. By making explicit the disparity between representation and reality, feminist writers dispute the single, objective perspective that is naturalised in much contemporary male-authored and constructed art. Exposing such
elements of foundational narratives to be male constructions that objectify and problematise the subjectivities of women through mechanisms such as the male gaze, speculative fiction writers point to the redemptive role of literature. By initiating conversations between texts, and establishing a sense of interconnectedness between people, eras, cultures and movements, literature is able to comment on and to alter society. The following case studies of twenty-first century texts will demonstrate the way in which writers and producers continue to participate in these discussions in relation to the specific pornified culture of today, drawing on the themes on which this chapter has focused.
Chapter Two
To be Female is to be Alien: Awakening to a Pornified Culture
Two recently released science fiction texts, Jonathan Glazer’s low budget indie film Under
the Skin (2013) and HBO’s hit first series of Westworld (2016), appear strikingly different in
style, form and intended audience. Their comparison, however, illuminates contemporary producers’ interest across cinema and television in the deconstruction of the human female experience. In both texts, gender in the context of cultural pornification is explored through the process of construction and becoming in the non-human and post-human figure. The cyborg protagonists, or ‘hosts’ of Westworld, Dolores and Maeve, and the unnamed extra-terrestrial protagonist played by Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, resist specific elements of pornified contemporary Western culture. Through visual media, they expose the
construction of contemporary femininity as posited by heterosexual male fantasy, suggest masculine sexual violence to be a defining feature of Western patriarchal and pornified culture, and question the possibility of agency and subjectivity in the light of post-feminism. Departing from the genre’s conventional representation of the female cyborg as monstrous, typified by Fritz Kang’s Metropolis (1926), highly sexualised and at the service of men, as in
Blade Runner (1982) for example, the narratives of both Westworld and Under the Skin center
on female cyborgs’ coming into consciousness. By so doing, they question what it is to be human and gendered female through narrativising the marginalised and ‘othered’ experience of women in hegemonic patriarchal culture.
As earlier texts such as ‘Bloodchild’ demonstrate, the interest in Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg as a feminist figure of resistance is rooted in the notion that ‘there is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women’: that the state of being female is itself socially constructed (Haraway 155). Calling attention to the construction and policing of boundaries that dictate difference and, as a result, oppression, Haraway’s ultimate desire is their dissipation, arguing that ‘gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism’(155). The cyborg is able to resist binary categorisation owing to its status as ‘oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence’: obscuring the borders between the human and non-human, the authentic and the artificial, the biological and
technological (151). Haraway’s cyborg transcends the period in which she originally wrote to inform the discourse surrounding gender, sexuality and power today. Contemporary
representations of the body of the post-human and the non-human, the cyborg and the alien, in popular culture interrogate what is it to be defined as female: exposing femininity, as Haraway does, to be artificiality composed rather than innately embedded. Westworld and
Under the Skin’s consideration of the cyborg and the alien specifically respond to the
perspectives of contemporary femininity as profoundly shaped by Western culture’s pornification and post-feminism, principally in the illusion of active female agency.
Westworld depicts the futuristic Delos corporation’s theme park that simulates life in
the town of ‘Sweetwater’ in the Wild West. A community of AI ‘hosts’ are unknowingly designed to entertain the predominately sexual and violent desires of the park’s customers, who pay forty-thousand dollars a day to live out their fantasies. Much of the spectacle of
Westworld revolves around the uncanny inability to distinguish between the humans and the
hosts in the park. Superficially able to pass as human, the hosts’ defining feature is suggested to be their moral principle which the sadistic humans do not possess; the humans’ insistence on the hosts’ lack of consciousness leaves them unencumbered by any sense of legal or moral repercussions for their actions. In the original 1973 film of the same title, the difference between the robots and the humans is more palpable and reliable, thus assuring that the viewer’s sympathies are aligned with the humans, as victims of an uprising caused by a technical glitch. In the 2016 version, viewer identification with the hosts is dependent upon the invisibility of their difference. Westworld suggests that Otherness is an arbitrary identity, one constructed only to enable the toxic behaviour of the park’s customers, and to ultimately ensure the imprisonment of the hosts. Westworld challenges the fixedness of categories by revealing the motive for their construction.The human’s desire to prescribe otherness through identity categorisation forms justification for a racial and gender hierarchy. Indeed, as Logan proclaims in Episode Nine, ‘your world was built for me and people like me. Not for you’, attesting to the narrative of difference that legitimises the claim that Westworld is designed for humans, and by extension all that Logan himself embodies: white, patriarchal masculinity.
Both Westworld and Under the Skin expose human femaleness to be merely skin deep; they exhibit the ambiguity not only of the recognisable and the other, but also between the body and the mindin order to defamiliarise and deconstruct essentialist notions of gender.
