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Popular Culture Review
corporatizing of society. He, She and It is permeated by admonitory images of
what life will be like in a near future where the common fears of the 1980s are
extrapolated into reality. Piercy presents images like the hazy orange glow under
the Yakamura-Stichen dome as a dust storm rages across Nebraska, the “wrap,”
which is a giant sunshade over Tikva to protect it from the ul traviolet light that
is no longer filtered out by an ozone layer, and the second skins that Shira and
the others must wear when they leave the protection of their domes and wraps.
Gibson never focuses as much on this level of environmental destruction, but
wasteland imagery is key to the cyberpunk ethos.
As good as Piercy’s corporate and anarchic urban spaces and naturewasteland images are, it is her appropriation of the key trope of “jacking-in” to
cyberspace that first marks He, She and It as a cyberpunk text. What initially
seems to be another feminine dystopian novel is immediately changed on page
eight when Shira inserts “the male coupler from the tenninal into the little silver
socket at her temple, just under the loop of hair that always fell there.” Such
sexLialized imagery at once recreates the same view of interacting with the
matrix that Gibson presents in Neuromancer, but here is an interesting twist.
Feminist scholars have continually attacked Gibson for the way in which his
hackers act as phallic projectors into the feminized matrix as penetrator and
penatratee. Here, the cyber-connection penetrates Shira, in effect making the
matrix phallic and her mind vaginal, but this image is not stable throughout the
book. Later in the text, Shira imagines herself a drilling machine penetrating the
Yakamura-Stichen database. Therefore, Piercy is no more radical than Gibson in
her presentation of the mind-computer interface. She is laudable for looking at it
from different angles, but she revolutionizes nothing—despite what some critics
would argue.
Along with handling the human-computer interface, Piercy
appropriates the key character of cyberpunk, the hacker. As discussed above, it
is true that the prototypical cyberpunk protagonist, Gibson’s Case, is a decidedly
flat, disaffected, and emotionally sterile figure, which is part of these characters’
appeal and verisimilitude. Piercy’s Malkah provides another reversal of the
hacker model, but she also upholds one of the fundamental characteristics of the
hacker that has drawn criticism. First, Malkah is more human than Case. She has
interpersonal relationships and her emotional states are more evident and varied
in the novel. More importantly, she embodies desirable aspects of feminist
doctrine: she is a leader in her community, sexually unfettered, and very talented
in her non-domestic work. She is self-actualized through building chimeras and
hacking corporate databases, but this raises a key way in which Malkah is
virtually identical to Case. After she is ambushed online, Malkah is convalescent
for a few days and as a result, falls into a depression. After all, her identity is
built on her role as the lead programmer-hacker in Tikva, and she realizes that
without that role, her joy in living is gone. Heather Hicks presents a sizeable
analysis of this aspect of He, She and It in which she points out the ways in
which Malkah is destroyed, even raped, as a result of her inability to jack-in