The aff’s approach to tech is via the male gaze – it’s dehumanizing and disproves the truth claims of the affirmative

Moving to Winterson’s The Stone Gods, we find that body technologies pervade the daily existence of the privileged in the extremely polluted planet Orbus. They basically rely on the preeminence of “visualization technologies” (Balsamo 57) to articulate a gendered appraisal of the body, sanctioned by the male gaze and propitiated by medical science. In the twenty-first century, Orbus has been long exhausted of natural resources, and Billie Crusoe works for Enhancement Services, controlled by the Central Power and gradually by MORE-Corporation, marketing Genetic Renewal for both sexes, though affecting women’s lives more drastically (Stone Gods 9). Women are subjected to a strict bodily Foucauldian “discipline of power” in Winterson’s dystopia, a practice promoted by mass media and the state. In this context, they submit willingly to a selfdiscipline that actually turns into physical and mental punishment. Men are usually fixed as being in their late forties, while all mature women look like Lolitas. Female bodies are subordinated to fashion, technological reshaping, and manipulation, to the extent that “the female body has nowhere to go” (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 233). And yet Orbus women comply with it while men go unscathed, mirroring the situation of gender injustice enacted in capitalist societies (Bartky 42). Contrary to Lai, who supports in her novel the need to return to nature, Winterson does not offer a negative appraisal of technology but rather of gender exploitation; she only resents the manipulation to which women’s bodies are subjected in the enactment of the “organs without bodies” refrain. Billie Crusoe is the privileged observer of the exhaustion of an old world and is meant to inaugurate a new one on Planet Blue, following the example of Defoe’s homonymous character. In the space expedition to Planet Blue, Billie travels with Spike, the first Robo sapiens, designed as the perfect Eve for the male astronauts’ solace during their long space travels, an object of consumption (Stone Gods 28) whom Billie rescues when her memory bank was about to be drained by the Corporation. Spike represents the latest technological achievement, yet her humanoid features not only make her resemble an ideal of femininity but also turn her into a slave for men, both as a highly qualified worker and as a sexual fantasy. Her subjection mirrors women’s subjugation throughout history and reinforces their association with technology. Plant’s formulation could also be applied to this case: “Women have been trapped by economic dependence on men as surely as robots are controlled by the implicit threat that their masters can always cut the power supply, turn the on-switch off, leave or put them back on the shelf” (Zeros and Ones 105). Spike’s perfect beauty also fits in with MORE’s ambitious project about cosmetic surgery and fixing in Orbus. Her example testifies to Balsamo’s contention about “the persistence [: : :] of gender in a postcorporeal world” (29). She is regarded by men as a beautiful woman, which leads us to conclude that femininity is visually and bodily constructed, even in futuristic settings (Balsamo 29–30). The extended use of cosmetic surgery, which vilifies and denigrates women’s bodies, and Spike’s ideal of perfection are the result of Winterson’s renewed interest in corporeality. If in previous novels she created fantastic bodies that defied the control of patriarchy and of normative heterosexuality, in The Stone Gods she imagines how authority is exerted by a naughty cyborg.5 The misfits of Wreck City resemble very closely the inhabitants of the Unregulated Zone. In Winterson’s futuristic society, they are outcasts who are rendered inadequate and who are made either to conform to the norm or to live as ex-cits, or ex-citizens. They add to the growing numbers of the Unknown, among them the toxic radioactive mutants, who still speak for the human in a dehumanized world: “Coming in on all fours, coming in on crutches made from rotten forest wood, coming in ragged, torn, ripped, open-wounded, ulcerated, bleeding, toothless, blind, speechless, stunted, mutant, alive—the definition of human. Souls?” (Stone Gods 195). Lai and Winterson’s novels denounce the risks societies run in misusing technology. In them, the scientific establishment is complicit with great corporations and the state to control individuals, and to perpetuate their manipulation of women’s physiology and their lives. In Salt Fish Girl, disease is a symptom of the system’s internal corruption, and bodies rebel against homogenization and forgetting. In The Stone Gods, Orbus has fallen prey to the tyranny of the gaze and constructs otherness on the basis of sexual and social prejudice. In light of Haraway’s conceptualization of the posthuman, we see that both novels invite readers to discredit either/or categorizations and to challenge neat definitions of identity, bridging the gap between the pure and the abject, and the human and other forms of subjectivity. These issues are discussed below.