This week, I read “A Brief History of Cyberfeminism” by Izabella Scott.  Scott opens her article by quoting Donna Haraway from A Cyborg Manifesto: “By the late 20^th century, our time, a mythic time, we were chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism . . . . In short, we are all cyborgs.”  Scott then tells that Haraway proposed that cyborgs will be the leaders of the future and “[t]his . . . is the self [that] feminists must code.”  Throughout the article, in fact, Scott discusses the idea of “hijacking” gender by reformulation of biology and was all technology.  Gender roles are constructed by many forces and Scott seems to be telling us that cyberfeminism is a way to reclaim construction of identity from the patriarchal hegemony, almost pulling the power right out from under their metaphorical noses.  This reminded me of the story of Molly Millions, a bodyguard-for-hire with cybernetic enhancements that appears in William Gibson’s Sprawl series of short stories and novels (of which Neuromancer, the novel that coined the word “cyberspace” appears).  Molly first appears in the short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” as a bodyguard for the title character, a courier of sensitive data that uses his brain to securely transport information (the less said about the movie, the better).  “Johnny Mnemonic” was published in 1981 and A Cyborg Manifesto was published in 1983, so it is not a far-fetched notion to think that the idea the cyborg-as-posthuman superhuman was circulating through the milieu of social thought.  There were also representations of strong female protagonists in media at the time, such as Ripley from Alien.  But Molly’s story of her transition from human to cyborg was not just a recoding of her identity, but also an overthrowing of her shackles from servitude to master of her own destiny.

Molly’s enhancements, we are told, are very expensive.  She has ten razors that extend and retract from beneath her burgundy fingernails, an enhanced neurological system to make her a better martial artist, and night vision abilities through eyes that are encased in reflective lenses, like mirrored sunglasses fused around her eyes, permanently affixed to her face.  Throughout the novels, she is described as slight in stature, but is capable of downing a man twice her size (it’s about knowing how to throw their weight around, Molly tells us).  She has finely manicured nails but spits when she cries because of her lenses.  We see that Molly has traits usually attributed to females, like manicured nails and a small stature, but she spits when she cries and enjoys fights, images that are more masculine.  Further, in both “Johnny Mnemonic” and Neuromancer, the first time she meets the male protagonists in both stories, she saves both from being killed.  The “mansel” protagonists also end up being protected by Molly in both stories.  Through technological and biological enhancements, Molly takes on the role that would usually fall to a male within the stories.  Further, she protects men who aren’t really capable of protecting themselves: one a courier with half his brain replaced by a hard drive, the other a hacker who is also a drug addict also looking to actively score but is needed for his unique hacking skills nonetheless.

In Neuromancer, we also learn Molly’s backstory.  In a scene where she kills Riviera, another cyborg who can make holograms who has used his ability to taunt and sexually harass Molly throughout the novel, she tells the protagonist Case that she killed him because Riviera’s taunts reminded her of her previous job of being a “meat puppet,” basically a prostitute whose mind was shut down while clients used her body.  We know she did the work in order to pay for her enhancements, but we are never quite sure what her motivations were for getting them (escape from a bad household or dreams of becoming a killer cyborg, for instance), but the cybernetic enhancements are seen as her freedom.  Throughout the novel, she silently took Riviera’s abuse, the way she was abused by the men who used her when she was a prostitute.  Riviera had to live in order for her team to accomplish their job and she had to take his abuse silently so she could get paid.  At the end, however, she killed Riviera using the enhancements she paid for when she had silently accepted her role as a sexual object.  This is reminiscent of the idea that women have to take a lot of abuse from men in the workplace to “get the job done,” to “fit in,” and be “team players,” in roles usually devised by male leaders of a team.  Molly reclaims her power to shape her own identity by killing Riviera for reminding her of her old passive self.  Molly both embodies and defies her gender classification as she embraces an identity that is based on her love of freedom and need for violence.

Is Molly a feminist cyborg in the sense that Haraway describes?  Maybe.  In one sense, Molly is identifiable as a female in a traditionally male role and is harassed by many men, especially in Neuromancer.  There is a sense of otherness about her, however, in that she is very professional in her job, that makes her more machine than human.  Can a cyborg then be considered a new gender based on technology instead of biology and society, one which transcends external efforts to assign it a role, unlike the male and female roles which are bound by the external efforts to define them?  Are there better examples of feminist characters in literature than Molly (consider she was introduced in 1981 so there has been much evolution of cyberfeminism since then)?  Finally, Molly loves violence; if this is her one human trait, the one that drives her to become a cyborg, can cybernetics not only be seen as liberating us from prescribed societal roles, but also enhancements of our base desires?