SOURCE: Foster, Thomas. “‘Trapped by the Body’?: Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (fall 1997): 708-42.

In the following essay, Foster analyzes the predominance of “themes of gender and sexual performativity or cross-identification in these narratives about cyberspace.”

What we have in today's virtual-reality systems is the confluence of three very powerful enactment capabilities: sensory immersion, remote presence, and tele-operation.

—Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre

In cyberspace the transgendered body is the natural body.

—Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology

Virtual reality, it turned out, was nothing but air guitar writ large.

—Robert J. Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment

Andrew Ross once rather notoriously described the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, originator of the cyberspace metaphor, as “the most fully delineated urban fantasies of white male folklore” (145).¹ In Ross's reading, cyberpunk representations of virtual realities...