A feminist subversion of gender binarism on cyborgian grounds through a critical analysis of cyberpunk fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass

Download

index.pdf

Date

2019

Author

Göksu, Deniz

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

229
views

175
downloads

The aim of this thesis is to explore the transgressive role of cyborg as a posthuman subject in feminist cyberpunk fiction in destabilizing the socially constructed binarisms concerning humanness and gender stereotypes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass. With the fall of Humanism, the taken-for-granted assumptions of Enlightenment mindset have begun to be unsettled by posthumanists. The problematization of what it means to be human set the ground for elucidating the artificiality of phallogocentric categories and thereby transgressing the borders of conventional dichotomies. In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, Haraway challenges binary oppositions and advocates a new fusion of identity. Her cyborg theory not only facilitates a territory for the discussion of humanness, it provides a new space for feminists to articulate possibilities of liberatory identity formations and escaping the heteronormative stereotypes of the patriarchal discourse as well. Regarded as the first science fiction novel and identified as a proto-cyberpunk novel, Frankenstein presents the relationship between the Western male scientist Victor and the posthuman monster in a subversive fashion which enables a cyborgian reading of the nineteenth century text from the lenses of a twenty first century reader. Similarly, Piercy’s work combines the elements of the cyborg theory with feminist agenda of revisionary mythmaking based on the relationship between Avram Stein and his cyborg Yod with reference to Frankenstein. The juxtaposition of these works enables insights about the possibilities of subverting binarisms that serve to exclude women from technoscientific areas.

Subject Keywords

Cyberfeminism in literature., Keywords: cyborg, posthumanism, cyberpunk, deconstruction, cyberfeminism

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12623500/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/43621

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Comparative discourse analyses of gender constructions in the novels of Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany Akçeşme, İfakat Banu; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2010) This dissertation examines the gendered discourses in the novels of the writers of different sexes/genders, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man and Samuel Delany`s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. This study investigates how writers linguistically construct their characters as gendered/sexed beings as an effect of certain identity politics, ideologies and power structures. In order to do so, critical discourse anal...
TREATMENT OF FEMININE MADNESS AS AN APPARATUS TO TRAIN THE OTHER IN SYLVIA PLATH‘S THE BELL JAR AND JEAN RHYS‘S WIDE SARGASSO SEA Uçak, Merve; Birlik, Nurten; Department of English Literature (2022-12-23) This thesis aims to discuss Female Gothic fiction in terms of its treatment of feminine madness and how Female Gothic challenges the relationship between phallogocentric discourse and its use of madness as an apparatus to train the subject. I claim that Gothic in literature is a form where fantasy dominates reality in an attempt to speak the unspeakable, voice the unreason that is silenced in the eighteenth century, with an aim to blatantly attack the logocentric structures of modernity. Female Gothic, on t...
A Study of a Female Character in a Male Dominated World in Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone Alpakın Martınez Caro, Dürrin (2018-10-01) This is a study of female characters in the novels of Margaret Drabble, focused mainly on what they have to say about the condition of women in our contemporary society. The author being English, and her stories taking place in Britain from the 1960's onwards, it has been considered relevant to start with an appraisal of British society and of the way it has evolved in recent years. Many of the points we make in a sober and descriptive manner have been taken up in a literary fashion by our author. This chap...
Abject representations of female desire in postmodern British female gothic fiction Aktari, Selen; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Literature (2010) The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the fe...
The Experience of marriage: a comparative study of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary & Halit Ziya Uşakligil’s Aşk-ı Memnu with a psychoanalytic feminist perspective Haider, Maheen; Aslan Akman, Canan; Department of Gender and Women's Studies (2014) Elaborating on the 19th century novels, Madam Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert and Aşk-ı Memnu (1899) by Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, this thesis aims to analyze and compare the two novels from a psychoanalytic feminist point of view, based originally on Sigmund Freud’s ideas on gender construction. It argues that the marriage in the novels is a social requirement of being a woman in a patriarchal society and the adultery by women might be a way of taking revenge from the patriarchal society. According to the psy...

Citation Formats

D. Göksu, “A feminist subversion of gender binarism on cyborgian grounds through a critical analysis of cyberpunk fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass,” Thesis (M.S.) -- Graduate School of Social Sciences. English literature., Middle East Technical University, 2019.