SF delle donne e cyborg nel terzo millennio in America

After, in the mid-1980s, William Gibson and Donna Haraway attracted attention to the hybrid icon of the cyborg and to its literary and political implications, starting in the 1990s women’s SF has followed in their steps. Whereas in early cyberpunk some male authors were fascinated by scenarios of disembodiment, as well by wishful dreams of absolute malleability of self and world, women writers including Pat Cadigan, Marge Piercy, and Kathy Acker, and others, have presented a more skeptical, less teleological vision, in dialogue with a tradition going from Du Bois’s notion of “two-ness” to recent feminism, from Anzaldúa to Braidotti. As a key part of that new generation of dystopias that Tom Moylan has defined “critical” and Darko Suvin “fallible,” these authors aim at problematizing personal and social conflicts, as well as new definitions of identity, without postulating one-sided solutions. This direction, often tinged with irony but no less connected with feminist discourse, has influenced a strand of light-toned adventure SF inaugurated by Lois McMaster Bujold, further developed by other writers in a still-ongoing process of differentiation. The essay concludes focusing on two crucial authors emerging in very recent years, Ann Leckie and Aliette de Bodard. Their work offers new syntheses of earlier tendencies (the former with highly sophisticated linguistic twists on space-opera tropes, in the latter alternate history adds an emphasis on race) and, in describing future societies predicated on full interaction and integration between “humans,” cyborgs, and artificial intelligences, with an often radical revision of gender roles, might be presenting glimpses of utopia.