As a woman, Bron feels it necessary to forego her own desires in order to accommodate the desires of the men around her. Acquiescing to Lawrence’s demand that they go out to dinner when she would rather remain at home, she observes, “after all, Lawrence was a man. And a real woman had to relinquish certain rights. Wasn’t that, she told herself silently, the one thing that, from her life before, she now, honestly knew?” The female Bron is less competent and efficient at her work and unable to act upon her desires for men she finds attractive for fear that such aggressiveness would turn off the kind of man she wants to approach her. Bron become a woman in order to ‘do’ woman better than the females around him were; as a woman, she discovers that “the doing, as she had once suspected and now knew, was preeminently a matter of being and being had turned out to be, more and more, specifically a matter of not doing.”
Through Bron’s disappointments and challenges, Delany diagnoses the damage that the sex/gender system of patriarchy does to women as individuals. Bron’s counselor tells him that his inferior work performance is a consequence of the fact that he is “somebody who believes that women are less efficient. So you’re just living up to your own image.” He argues that Bron can never really be a “complete” woman because “being a woman … means having that body of yours from birth, and growing up in the world learning to do whatever you do … with and within that body.” Bron hasn’t experienced the socialization required to make him the ‘real’ woman he desires to be, both because he has not occupied the female body throughout his life experience, and because the kind of ideology that used to produce the ‘inferior-to-man’ woman Bron desires is no longer a part of social experience in Delany’s heterotopia.
In Delany’s representation, being a woman is the result of a long process of socialization, the specific contours of which will be determined by the ideological elements influencing this design. Bron longs for an ‘earlier’ ideological formation, one in which woman would be produced according to his blueprint. He laments,
It’s so strange, the way we picture the past as a place full of injustice, inequity, disease, and confusion, yet still, somehow, things were … simpler. Sometimes I wish we did live in the past. Sometimes I wish men were all strong and women all weak, even if you did it by not picking them up and cuddling them enough when they were babies, or not giving them strong female figures to identify with psychologically and socially; because somehow it would be simpler that way to justify … [sic]
Bron finds himself unable to finish his sentence, to explain what the model of strong men and weak women would justify, but the reader can clearly see that such social shaping is used to justify sexist discrimination. Bron is told that he is “a woman created by a man” rather than the ‘real’ woman he longs to be; the similarities between Bron’s woman and patriarchy’s woman thus provide an effective critique of the sex/gender system and its systematic production of sexual difference.
Varley: Steel Beach
Varley’s novel also openly suggests that sexual difference is a thing of the past. The novel begins with the announcement that the penis is obsolete, about to be replaced by a new sexual stimulation technology that offers pleasure far superior to that which can be provided by simple friction. As our narrator Hildy explains, “the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs.” On its surface, Varley’s novel suggests an enthusiastic deconstruction of gender essentialism. The near-immortal characters move from one gender to another throughout their lives, except for a few aberrant individuals called Naturals who resist cosmetic body modifications. People generally live alone because long-term relationships are simply too extremely long term given the modified human life span. Sexual relationships can be monogamous or simply casual, and many individuals shift between hetero- and homo-sexual relationships with ease. Most children have a relationship with their mother alone, the concept of a father being illogical in a society in which gender is not fixed. One’s mother may be male or female at various points in one’s life, and most births are accomplished using artificial wombs. Sexual pleasure, reproduction, and social role have all been neatly severed from one another, a move that reveals the constructed and artificial character of a patriarchal social organization that would demand necessary relationships among these three terms.
The main character in the novel, Hildy, decides to switch gender from male to female after a virtual reality experience during which he had been female. After this interlude, Hildy decides that he is “wearing [his] body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind you in the crotch … it was time for a Change.” The novel reveals contradictory feelings about the process of Changing, which is always capitalized in the text. On the one hand, Changing is established as a commonplace activity in the novel, reduced to mere fashion through tropes such as the Body Change Parlour and this season’s fashions in body styling. In Hildy’s words, Changing is “no big deal.” On the other hand, some sections of the novel demonstrate a strong attachment to gender identity as an essential part of character. After emerging out of his virtual reality experience and being informed by the Central Computer that he had failed to notice the gender switch to female in the virtual world, Hildy responds with extreme emotion:
Words fail me again. How many degrees of surprise can there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square it, and you’ll have some notion of how surprised I was … I had been a girl before, and I was a girl now, and I never gave it a thought. Which was completely ridiculous, of course. I mean, you would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate, the difference would manifest itself to you, there would be this still, small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it would not have been the first thing you’d notice as you lifted your head from the sand, but it’d be high on the list. It was not just out of character for me. It was out of character for any human not to notice it. Therefore, my memories of not noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
This passage demonstrates the tension surrounding gender identity that permeates the novel: it is no big deal, but still, one notices one’s bodily gender.
Gender is so important to Varley’s characters that the failure to notice the gender switch constitutes proof to Hildy that the virtual reality experience had been a computer simulation, not a ‘real’ experience. Another intriguing aspect of this passage is the way Hildy describes becoming aware of the gender change—you notice that something is missing. This characterization of the penis as essential signifier of identity works against the earlier suggestion that it had become obsolete. Varley’s narrative is interesting to me precisely because it signals both the deconstruction and the reclamation of stereotypes required by the sex/gender system. Despite the openness of the world that Varley creates—one in which anyone can act in any way regardless of gender, can switch gender at will, and can engage in any sexual partnerings without reference to the gender of one’s partner—the novel works to validate heterosexual desire and traditional masculine and feminine behaviour.
Hildy’s direct address to the reader about the fine points of Changing is revealing on both counts. Hildy insists that he or she just ‘happens’ to be heterosexual in any gender. As well, Hildy’s attitude toward clothing ‘naturally’ shifts when Hildy shifts gender:
Can you call something a quirk when you share it with a large minority of your fellow citizens? I’m not sure, but perhaps it is. I’ve never understood the roots of this peculiarity, any more than I understand why I don’t care to go to bed with men when I am a man. But the fact is, as a man I am fairly indifferent to how I look and dress. Clean and neat, sure, and ugly is something I can certainly do without. But fashions don’t concern me. My wardrobe consists of the sort of thing Bobbie threw away when I arrived, or worse … I don’t pay much attention to colors or cut. I ignore makeup completely and use only the blandest of scents. When I’m feeling festive I might put on a colorful skirt, more of a sarong, really, and never fret about the hemline. But most of what I wear wouldn’t have raised eyebrows if I had gone back in time and walked the streets in the years before sex changing. The fact is, I feel that while a woman can wear just about anything, there are whole categories of clothing a man looks silly in.