SOURCE: “Feminism for the Incurably Informed,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 125-56.

In the following essay, Balsamo examines the effects of techo-culture on women and the feminist implications of cyberpunk.

All we ever want (ever wanted) was to be on that mailing list.

—Ron Silliman, What

My mother was a computer, but she never learned to drive. Grandmother was an order clerk in a predominantly male warehouse; she did all the driving for the family, having learned to drive almost before she learned to speak English; her first car was a 1916 Model T Ford equipped with a self-starter.¹ Both my mother and grandmother worked for Sears and Roebuck in the 1940s; mother entered orders on a log sheet, grandmother filled those orders in the warehouse.² When an opening in payroll came through, my mother enrolled in night school...