Osborne

Maria Osborne
Professor Tom Foster
English 349: Science Fiction and Fantasy
March 15, 2016
Girls and Dolls: Rhetorical Bodies and the Identity Politics
of Race and Gender in Postmodern Science Fiction
As Bruce Sterling asserts in his introduction to cyberpunk in Mirrorshades, science
fiction starting in the latter part of the 20th century is characterized in part by an intimacy with
technology. Science fiction narratives began to center less around ideas like space exploration
and more around technology that everyday people interact with as a normal part of life. Some of
these technologies involve those that change the way the human body looks or functions, or,
alternatively, allow someone to upload themselves out of their body. This latter option offers
an escape from the physical body, implicit in which are assumptions about a certain dichotomy
of mindidentityand body: the idea that people are not their bodies. In some sense then it is a
masculine fantasy, since women have historically been seen as less rational and more embodied
than men (even going back to Aristotle, who believed that in reproduction, the male parent gives
Form and the female parent Matter to their offspring). Colonial rhetoric would echo similar
sentiments about non-westerners and people of color.
Therefore, it is important to consider how the idea of bodily escape and modification
functions in science fiction narratives that center around people with bodies that dont fit the
default of whiteness, maleness, ability, etc. In this non-default context, the burden of having
a body becomes specific to certain anatomical features. Escape as a fantasy can thus take on
different connotations here, since features like dark skin become a social liability. The question

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in these cases becomes: is escape from the body even more desirable (that is, should we assert
the dualistic notion that people are not their bodies in order to combat essentializing notions of
sex, race, etc.), or should the goal be to redefine bodily identity politics in a way that is
empowering rather than oppressive? I will be using James Tiptrees The Girl Who Was Plugged
In and Aliette de Bodards Immersion to explore ideas surrounding these questions.
Ultimately, I claim that these stories upset dualistic notions of mind and body by
reasserting the body as a rhetorical tool of identity politics. I refer to the body as rhetorical in the
sense that it is not neutral, but carries symbolic meaning in the eye of the beholder, including
judgments on gender and race. In other words, both these stories show how the act of looking at
the body, and the consciousness of being looked at is an integral part of ones identity. This idea
draws on modern and postmodern theories such as W. E. B. Dubois double consciousness and
Judith Butlers ideas of gender performativity: perception of the self is shaped by knowing how
others are perceiving our bodies, and we attempt to present our bodies in a way such that they
will be read correctly in terms of some form of identity. Reading the two stories together,
The Girl Who Was Plugged In explores gender mainly from the perspective of the watcher,
while Immersion gives us more insight into the mind of the watched. Immersion is also
helpful to read in conjunction with The Girl Who Was Plugged In because it addresses the
issue of racial as well as gender embodiment, and comparing the two can point to both the
similarities and differences in perceptions of raced and gendered bodies.
The Girl Who Was Plugged In explores this idea of the constructive gaze mainly in
terms of embodiment of femininity and validation of gender identity. In the story, our main
character P. Burke becomes a remote, operating a manufactured body called Delphi. This
premise is one that indeed presents a variation of the cyberpunk trope of uploading the mind,

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which does suggest a typical notion of mind/body dualism. But the narrative struggles with the
question of whether Delphi is simply P. Burkes mind in a different body. At one point the
narrator refers to the P. Burke body as the beast shes chained to, that it is impossible to
become Delphi (Tiptree 56). But the narrator also questions this: it isnt precisely P. Burke
whos stepping, laughing, shaking out her shining hair. How could it be? (Tiptree 47). Thus the
narrative also seems to suggest that something about P. Burke is fundamentally changed by
inhabiting this different body. I argue that Delphi acts differently than P. Burke because she is
aware that others see this body differently than her natural one.
Furthermore, I argue that this is because the Delphi body is one that embodies femininity
in a way that P. Burkes original body does not. Because of this, others perceive and validate her
gender identity in a way that before they did not. We first meet P. Burke by the narrator literally
telling us watch her, and most of we learn about her regards her ugliness. She is totally defined
by her lack of conformity to beauty norms. Of course, such norms are inextricably tied to gender
performance. Her ugliness prevents her from being a woman: Look, P. Burke is about as far as
you can get from the concept of girl. Shes a female, yesbut for her, sex is a four letter word
spelled P-A-I-N (Tiptree 55). The use of sex is telling here, because it initially appears that it
refers to the idea of being female or male. By the end of the sentence its clear that that idea has
been lost to P. Burke, that her anatomy no longer corresponds to her gender identity. P. Burke,
while female in a biological sense, is not a girl Delphi, conversely, is referenced as having no
real sex but has a perfect girl-body that indeed epitomizes the concept of girl (Tiptree 49).
The fact that the narrative phrases girlhood in terms of concepts is a recognition of gender as
distinct from sex/the body. But P. Burkes lack of sense of sex suggests that the property of
being acknowledged as a real girl is closely linked to whether others read her body as being

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acceptably feminine. The conventional sex/gender binary often reduces gender to a function of
genitalia, but this story complicates that by asserting that a sexless body can be female, and
noticing that embodiment of gender constitutes far more than just reproductive organs.
The narrators referral to P. Burke by a de-gendered name also emphasizes that refusal to
validate her gender identity. But not only is the P. Burke body unworthy of being considered
female, it is unworthy of being considered human. Use of diction such as monster, beast, and
carcass to describe her body serves to dehumanize her, and it is precisely her ugliness that
justifies such dehumanization (Tiptree 56, 66, 76). The implication here is that at least for some
characters in the story, the person known as Delphi is more real than the person known as P.
Burke. In fact, Paul Isham tells Delphi at one point: Look, peanut, where do you get the idea
you arent real? Youre the realest (Tiptree 59). To those not aware that she a remote, Delphi is
perfectly real, since her body has a sort of social credibility that the P. Burke body does not.
Delphis reality as a person corresponds to the perception of her as truly a woman, a courtesy not
extended to P. Burke.
The reason why Delphi looks the way she does is of course one of the key plot points in
the story: shes a tool of advertising, even if advertising itself has become taboo in the storys
setting. The performative aspect of gender identity is emphasized by the fact that Delphis body
is constructed to conform to ideas of womanhood: quite literally, shes going to be a girl that
people watch (Tiptree 152). It is strongly emphasized that Delphis perfect girl-body is tied to
how that body can be visually consumed in a sexual way. She is described in highly eroticized
terms such as kitten and doll; shes porno for angels, a phrase that invokes the paradoxical
expectations of both sexuality and purity involved in femininity (Tiptree 48). The narrator notes
that Delphi has a rare appeal in that she not only has it for anybody with a Y chromosome, a

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clear indication that Delphis body is explicitly expected to satisfy a heterosexual male gaze
(Tiptree 61). The paradox is that even though Delphi is seen as real by the general public, she is
also dehumanized, though in the sense of her being a cultural product to be consumed rather than
animal or monster imagery. (We might compare Delphi to robots in current science
fiction/fantasy like the television show Futurama, for instance, where most of the shows
female robots have exaggerated breasts and lips and eyelashes. This is a contemporary
example of a visual medium where femininity is extremitized and sexualized in order to gender
sexless bodies as female.) On one level then, The Girl Who Was Plugged In can be read as a
commentary on female objectification. In this story, embodied femininity is a trap: unless a
female body can be sexually objectified, she wont be considered a true woman.
Overall, P. Burke/ Delphi is defined primarily by her appearance and who is observing
that appearance, as reflected in the narration style. That narration style also puts the reader in the
place of an observer, and the tone and use of terminology like carcass to describe P. Burke or
porno to describe a 15-year-old girl can indeed make the reader very uncomfortable. But such
language dramatizes real-life reactions that we have all the time, like judging a person as ugly,
sexualizing a womans beauty, or making a judgment on a persons gender identity (or even
sexuality) based on whether their body conforms to standards of femininity. Forcing the reader to
participate in a consumptive gaze in such an extreme way is disturbing and estranging, but also
forces a reflection on how powerful this gaze, usually taken for granted, actually is.
The Girl Who Was Plugged In is an intensely dark story, but Immersion addresses
similar ideas in a way that leads to a more potentially positive take on the importance of bodily
identity. It too explores connections between ones identity and how others read ones body,
but is more focused on embodiment of race than gender and employs a narration style that allows

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for a more internal focus than The Girl Who Was Plugged In. In this story, characters wear
immersers that change the wearers appearance and thought patterns. The way immersers work
in this story is significant in the way that they blur lines between bodily and cultural identity.
They take a given culture and parcel it out to you in a form you can relate to, but they also
change a persons appearance in a way that is supposedly analogous to that culture (de Bodard).
For Agnes and other members of the Rong culture, those who wear them can become someone
else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful (de Bodard). Its a classic mind invasion, in
Sterlings terms, but with the twist that its not separable from a kind of body invasion. In
particular, physical markers of race and ethnicity become integral parts of a persons identity,
and Agnes identity is in crisis in part because she has changed her appearance to a point where
shes lost the sense of what her body racially signifies. Changing your skin color upsets your
entire identity and makes you into someone else. Indeed, the story begins with Agnes, a
woman who uses her avatar to look racially Galactic, looking at herself in a mirror, no longer
knowing who she is. So the idea of a rhetorical body that reflects a certain identity at once
becomes quite literal. Its a strong indicator that the consciousness and importance of being
looked at in a way that validates ones identity is key to understanding how race is constructed in
this story. Tam later says of Agness body that that wasnt what she was, inside (de Bodard).
Its imagery that puts Agnes identity in terms of inside vs. outside, which could be considered
analogous to mind vs. body, but whats important is how the story implies that each is essential
to the other. The visual is a mirror of the ideological, and vice versa.
Like Delphi, Agness avatar allows her to present a body that is more socially acceptable.
Returning to a point I mentioned previously, this is another excellent example of how escape
from the body takes on a different meaning when those bodies dont conform to certain defaults.

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Its people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws
attention to itselfthe stretched eyes the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape, says the
narrator in reference to Agness original body. That concept of a body that draws attention to
itself is highly indicative of how important the consciousness of ones body being watched and
read is. The politics of racial embodiment take on a certain tension, then: on one side, there is a
desire to escape from a body that carries rhetorical significance of racial otherness; on the other,
there is the identity crisis that comes from trying to hide that raced body. But this story can be
read as working towards resolution between those two sides. Take the instance where Agnes
takes part in seeing, reading and then reevaluating her reading of a non-white body: she notices a
woman whose avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon shaped
face with skin the color of cinnamonno, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a color youve
seen all your life (de Bodard). In other words, Agnes goes from seeing darkness in skin tone
through a gaze that exoticizes it in terms of food metaphors (which is quite common in literature)
to one that acknowledges its existence while also normalizing it. In general, this instance and the
story as a whole serve as an argument against the idea of colorblindness. Agnes can still see skin
color, whats important is that she sees it it in a way that doesnt construct it as Other.
Whats less resolved in the story is whether a real white person could also be capable
of a gaze that validates rather then constructs an exoticized racial identity. Like The Girl Who
Was Plugged In, there are questions raised as to the reality of certain bodies, and this narrative
strongly argues that Agnes cannot really be white. She indeed seems real to her Galactic
husband, but to herself and those who are not Galactic she is a hollow shell, a ghost of
[herself] theres no one there, just a thick layer of avatar (de Bodard). This has the potential
to suggest some kind of racial fundamentalism, such as when the narrator says, you cant think

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like a Galactic unless youre been born into the culture, which suggests a kind of naturalized
view of culture (de Bodard). Its important to note that in general, by using the language of
computers and electronics, cyberpunk type stories can communicate ideas about bodily identity
using the metaphor of wiring. For example, returning to Tiptrees story, the narrator tells us
that remotes dont love because the circuits designed that out from the start (Tiptree 69). In
Delphis case, this comes off as ironic statement, since Delphi seems entirely capable of love. In
Immersion the physical brain is connected with identity, and a system rooting around in
[ones] brain can change a persons cultural and social attitudes (de Bodard). Because of this
and the suggestion that Agness whiteness is not real, Immersion implies a certain
immutability to race, while The Girl Who Was Plugged In is more ambiguous about whether
bodily identity can be naturalized or put into terms of how a brain is wired.
In general, though, both these stories explore forms of bodily assimilation of ostracized
and othered people. This is very obvious in Immersion: as Tam says, we make ourselves like
them, because they push, and were nave enough to give in (de Bodard). The Girl Who Was
Plugged In also presents a sort of cultural assimilation narrative, though not in the usual sense
in that it doesnt address issues of race, ethnicity, language, or nationality. Instead it has to do
with conformity to embodied feminine gender norms. There is less of an explicit focus on this
femininity in Immersion than The Girl Who Was Plugged In, but since Immersion deals to
some extent with beauty norms, the intersection of race and gender implicitly enters the picture.
Quys avatar is paler than her, and taller: it makes her look beautiful, most customers agree,
which clearly points to the relationship between race and femininity and beauty (de Bodard).
Thus the two stories show certain interactions between race and gender construction. However,
they also exemplify the differences between construction of raced and gendered bodies.

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The disparities can be seen in how each story explores its attitude and its characters
attitudes towards their brand of assimilation. Immersion is a very contemporary story, and it
illustrates how the idea of changing race is highly problematic in modern thoughtimmersers
basically become a kind of high tech means of passing, and all the problems involved in passing
remain. For Agnes, assimilation is wholly stifling and oppressive. For P. Burke, acquiring a more
culturally acceptable body liberates her from the stigma of her original bodys unsightliness, but
The Girl Who Was Plugged In was written in the 1970s so may be less likely to correspond to
contemporary gender theory. From a modern perspective Tiptrees work could be seen as
problematic for naturalizing behavior based on sex (in The Screwfly Solution this has to do
with inherent male violence and heterosexuality, for example). But I would argue that this story
does align with certain modes of modern thought surrounding transgenderism, since it asserts
gender identity as potentially distinct from reproductive organs and explores how gender is
affirmed by the gaze of others. Its important to note that in the context of transgender bodies,
the concept of passing is much more positive than it is in the context of raced bodies.
In the end, however, P. Burkes story is a pessimistic one, where embodiment of
femininity is a something of a lose-lose situation, while Agness is one that shows how bodily
identity can be empowering. There are different connotations to the immutability of particular
types of bodily identity, yet both show the sheer rhetorical power of the body, and how ones
identity is validated or upset by how others read that body. Since the rhetorical body depends on
others seeing it, both stories also assert a communal notion of identity, whether in the positive
sense of belonging (as in Immersion) or in a negative sense of manipulation (as in The Girl
Who Was Plugged In, with its discussion of demographics like age and sex used in targeted
advertising).

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How universally we can apply these ideas of bodily identity is of course questionable,
since they do depend on certain conventions. This is easy to see in the context of gender. On one
side, the concept of the body as affirmation of identity is incredibly important when applied to
transgender people who have undergone surgical and hormonal treatments to modify their bodies
so that they reflect their gender identity. And usually these modifications reproduce and align
with conventions regarding the relationship between anatomy and gender. But if we recognize
genders that have no conventionally defined anatomical analogs (i.e., agender or genderqueer),
that concept of gender validation as a function of the body being looked at is harder to discuss. I
should also note that the performative aspect of gender encompasses visual cues besides the
anatomical (like clothing) as well as behavioral cues, but Ive deemphasized this in order to
discuss how closelyand potentially dangerously gender validation is tied to perceptions of
the body. The Girl Who Was Plugged In shows how a body can be de-gendered by virtue of its
appearance, but from a modern perspective this can go the other way: we might, for example
over-gender someone who identifies as agender because their body has breasts or long hair.
Tiptrees story also explores the problem of how someone can be denied personhood if their
body cant be defined in gendered terms.
Embodied gender is something of a minefield. In many cases, gender and the body
correspond in traditional ways, but in others they do not. In other words, defining the importance
of bodily identity becomes difficult when also trying to recognize the multiplicity and
uniqueness of individual experience. On the racial side, people of color express resistance to the
idea of colorblindness because to not be seen as raced is an act of erasure. Race as a bodily
identity can thus be more fundamentalized than gender, since changing race is seen as so
problematic. Perhaps then seeing a body as raced can be more trustworthy than seeing a body as

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gendered. But how exactly we redefine the importance of immutable race in a non-essentializing
way in unclear, and there are certainly potential problems that could arise by equating race with
culture in the way that Immersion does. The act of seeing someone projects certain ideas onto
that person, but theres no all-encompassing answer as to whether that is a good or bad thing.
But what these stories finally remind us is that the fantasy of escaping the body is
masculine not only in the sense of assumed male rationality, but also related to how
masculinity/whiteness is less visible than femininity/non-whiteness. Its easy to forget that
identities of maleness or whiteness (or other defaults) are equally as rhetorical as identities of
blackness, disability, etc. Its just that those types of bodily identities dont stand out as much
(recall how Immersion discusses how being non-white draws attention to oneself).
Immersion and The Girl Who Was Plugged In are stories that use bodies that are more
visible because of their sex or race to make a point about the power of the constructive gaze, but
seeing dark skin or a female body as indicative of a certain identity is only possible in relativistic
terms where light skin and male bodies are also seen and read certain ways. These narratives
urge us to see bodies that are different from our own in ways that do not objectify or other them,
and remind us that no body is truly invisible. That, I think, is the way to move forward from
these types of stories: challenge the notion of bodily defaults, and ultimately bring what passes as
invisible back into the light.