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This time I wrote about how Cyberpunk 2077’s braindances are a pale imitation of interesting (but still very problematic) work from earlier cyberpunk cinema and lit, including William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy.
https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2021/02/10/other-flesh-cyberpunk-2077
This time I wrote about how Cyberpunk 2077’s braindances are a pale imitation of interesting (but still very problematic) work from earlier cyberpunk cinema and lit, including William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy.
https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2021/02/10/other-flesh-cyberpunk-2077
I also want to mention that I wrote this piece directly from my perspective as a nonbinary trans woman, rather than trying to write as an all-encompassing “trans.” Trans identity isn’t monolithic or ahistorical.
Rather, it’s diverse in terms of culture, history, & privilege.
Rather, it’s diverse in terms of culture, history, & privilege.
The critiques in this piece are also rly deeply in rooted in transfemme experience — they appeal to transmisogyny specifically.
They’re ideas from a girl whose body is commonly viewed like a tourist spot, but who still gets treated like a stranger in her own flesh.
They’re ideas from a girl whose body is commonly viewed like a tourist spot, but who still gets treated like a stranger in her own flesh.
a line I cut from this piece:
“Whose body is hosting whom? What’s voyeurism, and what’s self-definition? Who’s a tourist, and who gets to act like a native?”
Read that alongside the common rhetoric in favor of “bathroom bill”/“protecting women’s spaces”-type legislation.
“Whose body is hosting whom? What’s voyeurism, and what’s self-definition? Who’s a tourist, and who gets to act like a native?”
Read that alongside the common rhetoric in favor of “bathroom bill”/“protecting women’s spaces”-type legislation.
I think this is important to mention, because cyberpunk is queerphobic and transmisogynist in the same way it’s xenophobic/orientalist.
The cultural anxieties Pondsmith & Gibson (& al.) drew from aren’t only social and economic. They’re also biological and psychosexual.
The cultural anxieties Pondsmith & Gibson (& al.) drew from aren’t only social and economic. They’re also biological and psychosexual.
@reidmccarter actually did a piece on Cyberpunk 2077 as throwback to the dystopian fears of the 1980s (which I loved).
But the unspoken piece of ‘80s dystopia is very often AIDS in America — along with its associated racial/drug-related/queer panics.
https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-review-1980s-nostalgia/amp
But the unspoken piece of ‘80s dystopia is very often AIDS in America — along with its associated racial/drug-related/queer panics.
https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-review-1980s-nostalgia/amp
William Gibson’s “Sprawl” setting isn’t entirely prediction: it’s also clearly informed by the AIDS-ravaged San Francisco and New York City of the ‘80s.
Pat Califia even reads like a cyberpunk radio jockey in “Victims Without a Voice,” a 1985 piece on AIDS for @TheAdvocateMag:
Pat Califia even reads like a cyberpunk radio jockey in “Victims Without a Voice,” a 1985 piece on AIDS for @TheAdvocateMag:
It’s likely not a coincidence that the Loas of Haitian Vodou begin “infesting” cyberspace in Gibson’s “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive”
These books were published only a few years after Haitian-Americans were named as a group of interest re: AIDS, secondary to gay men.
These books were published only a few years after Haitian-Americans were named as a group of interest re: AIDS, secondary to gay men.
(I haven’t found a primary source on this, but in “And the Band Played On” Randy Shilts recalls contemporary writers speculating that Haitian-Americans were at risk because of their spiritual/religious practices before the true etiology of AIDS was known.)
Of course, the transmisogynist arm of these anxieties manifests in more covert ways. Think of “Blade Runner’s” replicants — dangerous, perpetually doomed pretenders to human identity, prompting existential crises if you should fall in love with one.
Or if you are one yourself.
Or if you are one yourself.
Note the sexualized uncanniness of “Neuromancer’s” Case entering Molly’s body, also, and the shame-y subtext of GitS’s foreign minister in a Geisha body.
In Gibson’s work, this “pretenderhood” anxiety can even intersect with Blackness and race in bizarrely prescient ways:
In Gibson’s work, this “pretenderhood” anxiety can even intersect with Blackness and race in bizarrely prescient ways:
Also one sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020 has rules for “exotics,” i.e., literally just furries and scalies only it’s biopunk.
(this is just one example of the metric ton of cool Cyberpunk 2013/2020 shit that never made it into 2077.) https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Exotics
(this is just one example of the metric ton of cool Cyberpunk 2013/2020 shit that never made it into 2077.) https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Exotics
(I should also mention that Case “entering” Molly is paralleled with them having rly graphic sex, which is why the dynamic works.
This is one reason I think 2077 should’ve sought an “AO” rating: cyberpunk has *always* been pornographic! And that’s why a lot of it is rly great!)
This is one reason I think 2077 should’ve sought an “AO” rating: cyberpunk has *always* been pornographic! And that’s why a lot of it is rly great!)
But I bring all of this up in order to illustrate that the retro, hustler-queer aesthetic & milieu that Cyberpunk 2077 appropriates has a history. It’s one that’s deeply intertwined with transfemininity, sex work, Blackness and AIDS.
It’s also a history subject to decades of sanitation and erasure.
Queer ppl were killed & stigmatized by AIDS, the trans women among them recorded by contact tracers as “gay men.” The neighborhoods where these people lived have long since been swallowed up by gentrification.
Queer ppl were killed & stigmatized by AIDS, the trans women among them recorded by contact tracers as “gay men.” The neighborhoods where these people lived have long since been swallowed up by gentrification.
The radical, gender/kink-inclusive Lesbianism of Pat Califia’s “Sapphistry” has been largely buried, as well as the origins to a lot of Andy Warhol’s work.
And that’s only a couple of examples I’m particularly attached to. This topic is rly sweeping.
And that’s only a couple of examples I’m particularly attached to. This topic is rly sweeping.
There’s a sense in which cyberpunk & AIDS-era queerness just *are* ‘80s nostalgia to me, also. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew; my family’s from the mid-Atlantic. My mom is a queer Gen X-er from Boston and my godmother is the same from New York.
I was raised by people who’d been in very close proximity to all of this.
& I grew up knowing the ‘80s mainly as a really dark period in history that produced a ton of really great books and music. ‘80s nostalgia was Star Trek: TNG and Talking Heads, and, y’know, cyberpunk.
& I grew up knowing the ‘80s mainly as a really dark period in history that produced a ton of really great books and music. ‘80s nostalgia was Star Trek: TNG and Talking Heads, and, y’know, cyberpunk.
As in, William Gibson paperbacks my mom and my godmother handed me when I was 14-15. Which I very much understood in the context I’ve explained above.
But it does strike me as wrong to consider the cyberpunk genre as a thing that’s or “only” about late capitalism. It draws so much from anxieties about queerness, addiction, & AIDS, as well as from the lives, creations & suffering of many people otherwise consigned to obscurity.
Both the genre & criticism of it are far richer when they recognize that the genre is really indicative of a tangle of economic, social, biological, and psychosexual anxieties.
And that the cyberpunk idiom acts these anxieties out on a number of intersecting identities.
And that the cyberpunk idiom acts these anxieties out on a number of intersecting identities.
