Cyberpunk
"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).
Welcome in, choom.
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I haven't read it yet, but from what I've just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I've heard about it previously — I'm very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there'd be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.
(I've always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)
Yeah, I personally tend to Julia Serano's understanding of gender (with both innate and social aspects), but the way Haraway talks about it is making me reconsider some stuff.
Oh I have theories about gender, but alas I'm too tired to elaborate much right now. Suffice it to say, I think which gender we identify with (I.e. what people, and only then by extension, sociocultural concepts, our ideal self-image is shaped in dialogue with) is probably innate (and I have a whole etiology for this), but what gendered behaviors and expressions and identities and ways of being we adapt from that identification come from gender as a sociocultural construct, which is largely "arbitrary", multifaceted, and so on. This does not mean you can arbitrarily change or remove people's identification with other people, or their desire or lack thereof to express aspects of that concept, however. I think my account of exactly how that cultural construct functions, is identifiable, and what it is, as well as my account of the etiology of gender identification, are probably less rigidly medicalized than Serano's, however. I'm a poststructuralist through and through, and dislike essentialization, and enjoy using tools such as Wittgenstein's language games and family resemblances.