Cyborg Utopia in Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass. more

In this paper I explore the connections between Marge Piercy’s novel Body of Glass (1991) and the “cyborg politics” set out in the writing of Donna Haraway. While Piercy’s novel itself is generally presented as a work of cyberpunk fiction, the link between it and Haraway’s work is less recognised. Throughout her novel, the genre conventions of cyberpunk fiction are apparent, but just as evident are Piercy’s social and political concerns, which are rooted in socialist and feminist movements of the 1960s. Piercy’s focus is upon the construction and maintenance of community, and upon the access of those communities to knowledge and information; the communities on which she focuses are locally-based “minority” groupings rather than multinational corporations or anarchic city-states. These concerns mesh closely with those of Haraway, whose “Manifesto for Cyborgs” Piercy cites as a direct influence. This is in the nature of a feedback loop, since Haraway has cited Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (written in 1978) as an influence on the “Manifesto” (written in 1985).