Content area
Full text
Obviously, the political task Is not to refuse representational politics - as If we could. The juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field [...] the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize. (Butler 2008: 7)
In 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs' (1985), Donna Haraway names Samuel R. Delany among other feminist sf writers to whom she is indebted for her formulation of the cyborg as a post-gender political myth. It is a myth that is able to inform theories questioning gender essentialism and to critique the categories of identity that Judith Butler calls on queer theory to do. Delany and other writers of the New Wave like Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Joanna Russ were among the first to write about the breakdown of the gender binary; to the point of very nearly creating a queer science fiction genre. They did this by imagining worlds where this binary either does not exist, or is made very problematic, thus helping to lay the groundwork for feminists and queer theorists like Butler and Haraway to expose gender as a 'regulatory fiction' (Butler 2008: 46).
Queer theory today could benefit from a deeper affiliation with and acknowledgment of these writers as Haraway has done. For example, in Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz cites Delany but focuses primarily on his non-sf writings. Although queer approaches have been made to science fiction that work to undo the stability of gender binaries, there has been little attention paid to how the genre contributed historically to queer theory's formation. When I first set out to write this article, I hypothesized that I could highlight an sf example of this historical contribution and show that the cyborg is always already queer, already an answer to power's production of gender as a mode of repression. Of course, this argument depends entirely upon what your definition of a cyborg is, and unfortunately Haraway's definition of the cyborg as a post-gender political myth is not the dominant one, a fact she acknowledges in later writings. One need only think of popular cyborgs like Robocop or...