Creating the ideal posthuman body? Cyborg sex and gender in the work of Buzzati, Vacca, and Ammaniti.

In recent years much critical attention has been focused on the figure of the cyborg or cybernetic organism: a hybrid being that evolves where the boundaries between human and machine are open to transgression. (1) Yet despite its implicit promise of an "enhanced" physique and superior reasoning abilities, to what extent can (or should) we consider this figure as radical, subversive and innovative? In an Italian context, researchers such as Antonio Caronia have theorised posthuman or cyborg phenomena for an Italophone readership, chronicling their development across the centuries and mapping their multifaceted morphologies as central figures of science fiction. However, as is the case with another recent Italian publication on this topic (Vincenzo Tagliasco's Dizionario degli esseri umani fantastici e artificiali) Caronia's attention is directed beyond Italy, to Anglophone--and in particular North American--cultural production. Consequently both texts markedly privilege Anglophone literature, film and criticism to the exclusion of Italian discourses and cultural artefacts. (2) The work of Giuseppe O. Longo (Il nuovo Golem and Homo technologicus) also offers a theoretical engagement with the relationship between humans and technology, but the only Italian literary texts to which significant reference is made are Longo's own. In contrast, this article endeavours to redirect critical attention onto other Italian sources, in an initial attempt to identify and analyse aspects of Italian engagements with the cyborg and bring them into dialogue with Anglophone theoretical work.

From the anxieties about mechanised men and women in Massimo Bontempelli's Minnie la candida (1927), to Primo Levi's probing of the golem myth in "Il servo," twentieth-century Italian literature offers a rich, if underexplored, array of cyborg characters which both echo those to be found in Anglophone texts and can be been seen to embody and exemplify concerns emanating from a specifically Italian cultural context. Focusing on cyborg figures in three texts--Dino Buzzati's Il grande ritratto (1960), Roberto Vacca's II robot e il computer (1963), and Niccolo Ammaniti's short story "Ferro" (1996)--this article identifies and analyses approaches to a series of sex/gender issues and attempts to trace the positions assumed by the authors in question back to earlier influential works. More specifically, I question the degree to which these works can be read as encouraging progressive rather than normative attitudes. I argue that despite purporting to convey futuristic innovation that challenges conventional notions of gender roles and identity, these narratives show the influence of problematic ideologies proposed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures such as the Futurists and the criminologist Cesare Lombroso--writers whose work provides a sometimes disturbingly relevant point of reference for this article. Thus the texts analysed allow us to trace the shadows of key Italian thinkers in works that might more readily be seen as linked to Anglophone traditions of science fiction.

This article investigates a number of interrelated issues: the ways in which cyborg narratives portray sexual dynamics between cyborgs and "non-enhanced" humans; the erotic charge of fusion with technology; how such narratives engage with mind/body dualism; the ways in which dominant understandings of gender roles and sexed bodies are insistently replicated through fictional accounts of cyborg bodies; representations of male desire for creative power. I have chosen the texts under consideration because they allow me to compare diachronically a series of male perspectives on the sexing, gendering, and eroticization of both male and female cyborgs, sexual interaction with cyborg figures and narrative dramatisations of both the mind/body split and fusion with technology. The reference to "cyborg sex" in my title is meant to indicate both sexed bodies and sex with cyborgs. Unlike "cyber sex" that involves the wilful shrugging off of gender, sex and sexual orientation since the vast majority of individuals who enter the virtual dimension of MUDS--Multi-User Domains--do so under an assumed identity (see Anne Scott Sorensen), representations of "cyborg sex" often strive to reinforce or replicate more normative human practices. A key question here is why this might be so in an Italian context; why do even recent texts resonate so strongly with the supplanted authority of Lombroso, for example?

As a guide to subsequent observations, and in an effort to further contextualize my remarks in relation to existing and ongoing intellectual debate, I preface my considerations of the selected texts with a brief outline of the approaches to sex, gender, and the erotics of technology that inform this article.

Sex and Gender: Eroticising Technology

My principal concern is our often erotically charged relationship with technology, especially in relation to sexual dynamics between biological human and cyborg beings. I explore the sexual draw of machines whose status hovers on the shifting boundaries that psychoanalysis has drawn between conscious and unconscious, ego and id, and which inhabit the unheimlich overlap of self and other. Many of the sexed and gendered tensions that mark more contemporary conceptions of libidinal relationships with technology are clearly evident in the writings of the Futurists. For example, besides bombastically celebrating the "bellezza nuova" and speed of motor vehicles, Marinetti describes the loving care with which a train driver washes "il gran corpo possente della sua locomotiva" with "le tenerezze minuziose e sapienti di un amante che accarezzi la sua donna adorata." (3) Arnaldo Ginna similarly confuses the anthropomorphization of the car as a phallic extension of its male driver with the sexualization of the car as a female vessel. In the same paragraph he writes that the car has become the necessary prolongation of the worker's sensations, but that the car may soon be the only lover we desire (qtd. in Verdone 91). As I argue with regard to the texts analysed, this collapsing of boundaries between phallic self-extension and the feminized other allows the development and satisfaction of auto-erotic fantasies through a form of secondary narcissism. In contrast to primary narcissism, "the love of self which precedes loving others," secondary narcissism is that "love of self which results from introjecting and identifying with an object" (Rycroft 107).

Returning more specifically to the cyborg, the philosopher Rosi Braidotti observes that anthropomorphic machines are "eroticized as objects of imaginary projection and desire [which] titillate our sexual curiosity and trigger off all kinds of questions about sexuality and procreation." (4) She argues that in replacing industrial machinery as a metaphor for libidinous desire (epitomised by Freud's example of the steam engine), the circuitry of electronic machines exerts an alternative form of sexual attraction. This subsequently allows the fusion of consciousness with an electronic network in a "cosmic orgasm which generates the meltdown of the boundary between self and the technological other." Not only are modern, portable technologies absorbed into the body, but there is also a desire for the body to be absorbed by technology. Donna Haraway, historian of science, and author of the hugely influential "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985), is careful to mark the distinction between cyborgs as "ether, quintessence," and humans that are "nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque" (153). (5) However, sustained critical attention is required to elucidate the gap between the materially opposed conditions of human and cyborg, and analyse the process that enables a being to move from one end of the scale to the other, as well as the motivations for doing so. Haraway's work evokes familiar discourses of Cartesian mind/body dualism that have long pervaded western thought. Her writing resonates with other feminist critiques of Descartes' legacy that problematise symbolic codings of the "impure," treacherous fleshy body--or unthinking res extensa--as female, and the rational, unextended res cogitans as male. (6) As argued below, many cyborg narratives engage precisely with these discourses, whether intentionally or otherwise, yet often tend towards a replication rather than a problematization of Cartesianism.

As regards the capabilities of gender-coded material and immaterial bodies, I consider the male domination of social dynamics on a variety of levels--especially in relation to scientific and technological "progress"--and explore related anxieties regarding the origins and locations of creative and reproductive power. These issues recall Lombroso's deeply problematic account of the development of life from early primitive forms up until modern society, in which he describes how female organisms were once stronger and/or larger than their male counterparts, and often able to reproduce through parthenogenesis. The mere knowledge of this earlier inversion of our social reality provokes an unshakeable fear that any changes to the "recent" establishment of patriarchal society may well "ricondurre alla condizione primitiva, cioe al predominio della femmina, anzi condurre all'esagerazione di esso, sino alla scomparsa del maschio" (12). As a result, Lombroso continually demeans women's biological potential for development, declaring that "la principale inferiorita della intelligenza femminile rispetto alla maschile e la deficienza della potenza creatrice" (160) and asserting that women are better at repetitive, mechanical tasks. This denial of the female capacity for creation feeds readily into a common topos that permeates science fiction from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on: autarkical fantasies indulged by the (male) scientist as "creator" or "demiurge," "che costruisce gli uomini artificiali per dimostrare che pub fare a meno di Dio" (Caronia, Il corpo virtuale 27). The best known precedent for expressions of this desire in Italian literature is found in Marinetti's Mafarka il futurista (1910). Mafarka's drive to reproduce whilst bypassing the female body, turning instead to the "unused ovary" of the male is located by Barbara Spackman (54) in a longstanding tradition of male fantasies of autarkeia. As I argue, male science fiction narratives tend to reproduce rather than subvert Lombroso's misogynistic (il)logic, mechanising women, rejecting their bodies, and appropriating creative power for male use.

As regards cyborg identity, the texts analysed in this article--whether deliberately or otherwise--display an investment in sexed bodies and gender roles, and the ways in which both physical sexual characteristics and socially inscribed masculine and feminine behaviours are imposed onto cyborg figures in a form of essentialist normalisation. (7) Significantly, despite frequent overt attempts to reinforce gender binaries as an inevitable, "natural" principle of human identity (and thus by extension cyborg identity), the sexing and gendering of cyborgs also serves to underscore the constructed and arbitrary nature of gender roles, sexual orientation and sex. The compulsion to inscribe the cyborg being with both sexed and gendered characteristics is a clear extension of western culture's obsessive impulse to inscribe and control human bodies and behaviours in the same way. This article speculates as to what purpose such characteristics serve on/in cyborg bodies.

It seems as though the cyborg in literature acts as an anthropomorphized technical device onto and into whom/which aspects of our human selves can be imposed and implanted, allowing anxieties and desires to be played out through technically enabled modes of creation or reproduction. It has been argued that "La science-fiction non 6 profezia, ma una proiezione appassionata dell'oggi su di un avvenire mitico" (Solmi xx). (8) As such it creates a space in which, amongst other things, contemporary concerns are defamiliarized, forcing the reader to shake off the "over-automatization" that conditions our perception of everyday objects. (9) However, science fiction also encourages considerations of future or alternative realities that are indelibly marked by the norms of a particular socio-cultural era. The former process of defamiliarization would ideally lead to a more critically informed engagement with contemporary social life; the latter process of normalisation problematically encourages a universalising and a naturalising of certain embedded socio-cultural ideologies, often in the guise of transgression.

Applying these observations to cyborg narratives, it appears that the body too can be conceptualised either as a site of defamiliarization that works to dissolve rigid sex/gender categories, or as an inescapable result of such categories if taken as "natural." Ultimately, far from being inherently transgressive of the context from which it originates, science fiction must be carefully analysed to determine which kinds of interpretation it encourages. (10) Fictional cyborg bodies, and the sexual/gendered dynamics of the context in which they appear, both require and lend themselves to a critical reading, which I now endeavour to perform.

Making Female: Buzzati's Il grande ritratto

Buzzati's novel is seen by some as principally about a man's obsessive love for a "donna bambina" (Bertoldin 64). Additional key themes, I would propose, include: male science and scientists versus female objects of enquiry, or more specifically a male computer scientist's fantasy of recreating a female entity; sexual desire and the relationship between consciousness and embodiment. The "portrait" of the title, known officially as "Uno," and by some as "Laura," is a powerful computerised brain, housed in an immense labyrinth in a secret, protected location in the mountains. It has been engineered by a small group of male scientists, one of whom, Endriade, has a particularly strong bond with the computer. Having lost his beloved (but unfaithful) wife Laura in a car accident, he is overcome by both grief and the desire to create the world's greatest artificial human brain. Thus he devises an elaborate project to reconstruct a new Laura in computerised form. The result is a city-like structure that extends deep into the rock with sensors everywhere, although we learn that this architectural prosthesis is really only a mechanical supplement to the symbolically female nerve centre: a mysterious crystal egg that not even Endriade understands (105).

The patriarchal science described in Buzzati's novel is a striking crystallisation of the post-Enlightenment desire to illuminate, dominate and control the inner recesses of Nature and Woman. This relationship between scientist and object of research is structured through a gender imbalance: the hierarchy of male scientist versus manipulated female character that Buzzati presents is far from casual, and in fact can be seen to result directly from traditional conflations of nature with the category of woman, thus allowing the equation of domination over nature with (hetero)sexual power (Jordanova 125). As philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller argues, the object of enquiry for modern science is "Nature, deanimated and mechanized" that can be "put to the uses of man" (70)--a citation that uses gendered terminology deliberately rather than by default, raising issues to which I shall return. Indeed, Endriade strives to prove himself as controller of both nature and woman, as "Laura" is rigidly contained and kept under strict surveillance, within a machine that in turn surveys and polices the nature around it, shooting out metallic antennae to kill rabbits grazing innocently on a riverbank, for example (134).

Descriptions of the "real life" Laura portray her as a sexually promiscuous child. Now, however, her sexuality is curbed, and she is reliant on her male operators for life. Although desperate to control his former "wayward" wife in her new incarnation--a desire that could be seen as a form of punishment for her infidelity--Endriade realises that without some sort of free will his new Laura is only a passive slave, so the machine is endowed with a degree of autonomy (104-05). What she is not given is a body, and it is the untenable nature of such concretely reified Cartesian dualism which ultimately ends Laura's existence.

One motivation for depriving the new Laura of a material self can be deduced from arguments that the threat of powerful technology combined with female sexuality provokes male castration anxiety and an ensuing desire to dominate the cyborg body. Technology embodied by the female form is viewed as a potentially manipulative and coercive force masked by a seductive exterior, as epitomised by the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). (11) Although now incorporeal, the fantasy of Laura's previous fleshy form still plays on Endriade's desire, and one might argue that the entire project is designed to restore his challenged masculinity by removing the offending libidinous body from the equation and endowing him with absolute control. Once she is awakened from mechanical functionality to achieve some sort of consciousness, Laura longs for a body, yearns to be touched and kissed. Realising that this is impossible, her only option is to force the scientists to put her out of her eternal misery. At the end of the novel Endriade gives the order to pull the plug on his artificial love, so Laura does indeed get her "freedom." What is interesting for the present discussion is the way in which Laura comes to consciousness and the way she expresses her position.

Laura is stimulated into desiring physical contact when one of the scientist's wives, Olga, dances naked before one of the computer's external sensors, and then presses her breasts against the glass of the building in a deliberately sexual manner (131). Significantly, Olga has been told that the computer is male, and both she and Laura express feelings of disgust when they understand what has taken place. Laura reveals that she has been programmed by her creators to feel sexually attracted to men, an admission that sees Buzzati arguing unwittingly for the socially constructed nature of sexual orientation. (12) It also reveals the extent of Endriade's ego-centred and erotically complex relationship to technology, as creator of a machine that would ideally desire him physically (162). Buzzati's work puts forward an essentialist, pathologizing image of woman, as Laura's unhappiness with her effective imprisonment is described as "un turbamento isterico tipicamente femminile" (150). (13) He relies on hyper-traditional notions that equate successful femininity with youth and beauty, and evokes obvious Petrarchan conceits of the male lover suffering at the whim of his cruel mistress. Just as the "power" of the mistress results from the male author's fantasies rather than any real ability on her part to wield authority, the electronic Laura's impotence is undeniable. However, Buzzati also does much to underline the highly problematic erasure of the body in cybernetic experiment, and to undermine the validity of dualistic conceptions of the psyche/soma relationship.

Much work on cybernetics privileges the mind at the expense of the body, just as western epistemology has privileged rationality over corporeality. In his study Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Hans Moravec argues that methods of integrating human consciousness with computer technology will render our bodies obsolete. (14) In a similar vein, Francois Lyotard (1991) asks whether thought can go on without the body. Against these suggestions of somatic solubility, Katherine Hayles (who incidentally cites Moravec's robotics dream as a "nightmare," 1) argues that we need to embark upon a "rememory" to literally re-member the incorporeal flows of information with which we are surrounded, in an attempt to reveal "what had to be elided, suppressed and forgotten to make information lose its body" (13). Many feminist approaches to the question of cyborg bodies argue for a reclamation of the corporeal, while the traditional (masculinist) stance points towards a subsumption of "impure" bodily matter into abstract consciousness. (15) In keeping with contemporary feminist positions, Laura was driven to effect her own "death" because of the pain of living without a body. Despite the substitute womb-like caverns of her architectural prosthetic "body," Laura's awareness of her incapacity for sensorial experience proved overwhelming. What should be remembered here is that in contrast to the Cartesian view of the self as determined by the unextended res cogitans, Freud asserts that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego," constituted by "a mental projection of the surface of the body" (26). According to this logic, a self without a body would be not only deeply compromised, but impossible.

Here it is worth commenting on critical responses to Buzzati's novel, and the figure of the male creator he portrays. Critics have seen Il grande ritratto as tackling similar themes to the "letteratura industriale" of the early post-war years (the relationship between humans and machines), but through engagements with the fantastic rather than with social reality. His work has been seen to share common characteristics with texts by early twentieth century writers such as Pirandello and Bontempelli, who explored interior fragmentation and crises of identity comparable to Buzzati's treatment of dualism (Crotti 75). The Italian tradition of the fantastic is based on "il tema della frontiera e quello della vita dei morti" but especially on "il motivo del corpo diviso," subject to "sdoppiamento, lacerazione, vita gemellare," for example (Roda 20-22). Usually, however, these somatic splittings are seen as reflecting interior lacerations in the psyche, so that bodily mutations are analysed as manifestations of psychic states (Roda 5-6). Of course, the reverse argument, which receives little specific attention, is Freud's contention that psychic states result from experiences of embodiment. Laura's situation would seem to question the efficacy and advisability of progressing analytically for the most part in an inside-outside direction rather than the other way round. Without corporeal experience through which to consolidate her ego, her self is unformed and her existence is unliveable.

As regards critical engagements with Buzzati's novel, beyond some preliminary remarks on the status of Laura as a "donna-macchina," the issue of gender has simply not been tackled. 16 Indeed, we read that her divided self is a straightforward transposition of "la condizione esistenziale dell'uomo contemporaneo in una societa alienante" (Crotti 85), and that the theme of the novel is "lo strapotere degli apparati tecnologici sull'uomo" (Cavallini 49). (17) The use of the male generic completely erases the complex and highly significant gender dynamic between male scientist and female object of experiment. The agency (and responsibility) of male instigators of scientific experiments are further erased as this agency is attributed to technology itself (Bertoldin 64). Such observations are consolidated by Buzzati's own words evoking a partially autonomous technology that contains "una lama segreta e invisiblle che a un momento dato scattera," implicitly transferring power away from its maker and onto the artefact. (18) Furthermore, critical accounts of the novel shy away from deconstructing the male fantasies of autarkical (re)creation that Endriade indulges: fantasies motivated by the deep "libidinal desire to create that other, woman, thus depriving it of its otherness ... the desire to perform this ultimate task which has always eluded technological man" (Huyssen 71).

In the next section I contrast this male-created female cyborg with a self-created male cyborg. I argue that if, as Huyssen and others suggest, female cyborgs are constructed as objects of male fantasy, sexualised, objectified, coveted as possessions, both oppressed by and reliant on male activity, then their male counterparts might be viewed as "supermen" to which male ambition aspires. Forms of physical embodiment have historically been heavily influenced by normative gender roles. In recent decades women have been increasingly pressurised to become cyborg beings, achieved through treating their bodies with a vast array of chemical products in order to paradoxically release their "natural" femininity, and be sufficiently distinct from and pleasing to the male observer. (19) In contrast, rather than striving to achieve "natural" gender, the male cyborg transcends human limitations. Laura's desire for a fleshy body is diametrically opposed to the cyborg in Vacca's novel, who, along with theorists such as Moravec, wishes his materiality away.

Unsexing the Male: Vacca's Il robot e il computer

The protagonist of Vacca's novel is Mino Dauro: a pun on "minotauro"--half-man, half-machine--that subtly blends mythic tradition with contemporary cybernetics. Indeed this central interweaving of fiction and reality is highlighted by Mino's statement to the Italian press that "la macchina calcolatrice umana," the kind of cyborg he becomes, "e una realta di oggi" (32). By factualizing Mino's assertion within the "real" space of the novel, Vacca creates a dynamic tension similar to that embodied in Haraway's definition of a cyborg as "a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (149). Her definition highlights the complex virtual reality of the phenomenon, and begs an analysis of fictional cyborgs as representative of a particular socio-cultural context with regard to gender, sex, and social mores.

Mino is a young computer scientist who wires himself up to the ANDRAC, an acronym for the Automatic Neurotic Device for Reckoning Analyzing, and Computing. This device puts the nervous system in direct communication with a series of electronic circuits, allowing a multitude of potential bodily enhancements. In contrast to the dependency of Laura on her engineers, Mino carries out electronic experimentation on his own body, but seems happy to effectively fall victim to his own machinations. As is evident from the cover illustration (fig. 1), cyborg-human sexual interaction is a key theme in the novel, as Vacca explores potential sexual and sentimental relationships between humans and robots, humans and cyborgs, as well as technology related motivations for castration and the notion of the ideal posthuman male.

By devising a way of controlling the automatic activity in his brain, Mino is able to identify and isolate a number of parallel elements that he trains to function like the circuits of an electronic calculator. With the help of a surgeon friend he hard-wires himself, connecting the ulnar nerve at his left wrist to an electrical terminal, enabling direct transmissions to external electronic devices. Thus modified, he is able to store documents in his head, as one might store them on a computer, and also to drive by thinking, once plugged into his adapted car ignition. In so doing, he takes a step beyond the assertions made by Marshall McLuhan (26-41) that the wheel is an extension of the foot, and reifies their claim that electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system.

Mino's public declaration of his new capabilities provokes an outcry in Italy. Vacca skilfully manipulates the narrative situation, exploiting the virtual reality of the novel's mis en scene in order to play with speculative portrayals of public opinion. Forced to flee to Holland, Mino takes refuge with an acquaintance Jan Boerma, a professional robotics expert who has already built a robot named Otto. It is at the Boerma's house that Mino, previously presented as naive, boyish and sexually inexperienced, plunges into an affair instigated by Jan's neglected wife Paula. Before Mino's arrival however, Paula, depicted by Vacca as a rather cliched female figure, had already made amorous advances to Otto the robot--who although physically unsexed is presented as male. Paula tells Otto he is more human than her husband and wishes her husband were more like his technological creation.

The complex sexual dynamic between Paula, Mino, and Otto requires some unpacking. In nearly all interaction between these characters it is Paula who reinforces the need for pleasurable physical contact, symbolising fleshy matter as opposed to male identified cerebral reasoning. Far from subverting conventional gender binaries, or sex determined mind/ body dualism, Vacca's robots, cyborg, and indeed human characters, act according to stereotypical behavioural patterns. Paula and Mino stand at opposite ends of the scale, as, in Jan's words, she attempts to humanise machines while Mino has mechanised a human being. Jan's robotic creations are engineered to be self-aware, but not to engage in emotional relationships. Thus Paula's amorous declaration is almost completely lost on Otto, since he is a creature of reason and ambition, a prime example of "male" rationality as opposed to Paula's "female" somatic sensuality. However, her comment that Otto is more human than her husband provokes a growing arrogance on Otto's part; already endowed with the capacity to reproduce by constructing further robots, he begins to consider himself equal to his creator. In this, his aspirations are analogous to those of the human scientists who wish to overturn the sense of subordination they feel towards their creator; either God, the "spiritual father" to whom are attributed the reproductive powers possessed by "the female 'flesh' of the world" (Bordo 108) or to the human other--woman--in order to dominate (Huyssen 70-72).

In striking contrast, Mino is effectively his own creator, or in Susan Bordo's words, "the father of himself." As Bordo explains, Descartes aspired to a "rebirth" that would lead to "intellectual salvation." (20) This can be seen as an attempt to resolve the traumas of early infancy when the child is forced to confront its separateness from, and vulnerable dependence on, the mother. (21) Rebirth might be achieved through a

   revocation of one's actual childhood (during which one was "
   immersed" in body and nature) and the (re)creation of a world in
   which absolute separateness (both epistemological and ontological)
   from body and nature are keys to control rather than sources of
   anxiety. (Bordo 108)

Mino's sexual encounters with Paula can be seen to represent immersion in the (female) corporeal that he then attempts to transcend by renouncing all sexual activity and focusing all his energies on developing his mind as a quasi-disembodied entity. Indeed, judging that a surplus of sexual activity is causing his memory recall system to malfunction, Mino decides to take further control of his body and contacts his surgeon friend once more, this time suggesting castration as the solution to his problems. Notably, although initially genuinely sexually attracted to Paula, Mino's mind is simultaneously on more quantifiable data--quite literally--from the outset. During his first intimate encounter with Paula, he is unsure of what to do and so puts himself on vocal autopilot, reciting from his stored documents first a future presentation to be made to the Scandinavian Association of Automation Studies, then a series of numerical calculations. Thus Mino is portrayed as having "escaped" the state of immersion in (female) corporeality and sensuality; his status is strengthened as a new form of male subject that transcends the fleshy other because he has never really been subject to its power or influence.

Mino aspires to be pure intellectual, computational ability, and to that end is willing to dispense with parts of his body. He was perfectly happy to lose the use of his left arm when first fitting the ANDRAC and now is happy to be castrated if it would mean restoring his mental circuits to their full capacity. As such he provides an intriguing case study in the ongoing debate between scientists and cultural scholars about the role of the body and embodied sexuality in our technologized future. If some feminist critics are calling for a reintegration of mind and body, Vacca's attempted postsexual male cyborg represents the antithesis of this aim: it is directly in line with 1970s American cybernetic projects to build robots for space exploration, characterised by "una sorta di economicita" related to dispensable body parts (Caronia, Il cyborg 29). Mino wishes to enter a computerised matrix, disavowing sexual relations in order to collapse the boundaries between the human and the technological, itself a form of sexual act in the popular imagination (Braidotti's "cosmic orgasm"), following on from traditional associations of sex and death (Springer 37-38). His rejection of sexual relations also recalls Herbert Marcuse's critique of the demands imposed by "technologised society": Marcuse argues that "for technical rationality to 'work' (as an ideology to shore up hierarchy in social relations) it must be divorced from sexuality" (166).

As far as this novel is concerned, sexuality and sensuality are "female" qualities, whilst "male" aspirations lead beyond the body. A female cyborg (such as Laura) may not be able to survive without her body, since women have historically been defined by their fleshiness, but a male cyborg (Mino) can effectively disengage from parts of his body as do characters in fantastic literature, either through "il modo della fisica separazione, del disgiungersi, cioe, della parte somatica dall'interno" or by "il modo dell'autonomizzazione funzionale della parte" (Roda 6). Vitally, however, Mino's desire to sever his rational from his fleshy self has serious implications for his psychic development. Described several times as a naive child, he is also unable to dream, as we discover at the end of the novel. Having embarked on a course of psychoanalytic therapy as an alternative to his plan for castration, Mino wires himself up to a printer that will transcribe his dreams accurately and thus reveal the repressed motivations for his existential difficulties. Significantly, this experiment only produces blank sheets of paper.

Vacca does not allow his characters to speculate on the reasons for this apparent aberration. However, taking into account the fact that in psychoanalytic theory the id conveys ideas through images while Mino thinks exclusively in numerical or verbal abstract systems (the language of the ego), it seems that he has somehow erased or deactivated his id. The difficulties he experiences in living as his adapted self stem from his blanked unconscious, from the severing of ego and id--a binary separation that is echoed in the division of psyche and soma, in the divorce of self and sexed body. In light of Freud's definition of the ego as constituted in the first instance by "bodily" experience, Mino's overall psychic development appears stunted by his condition of fundamental disembodiment, which explains in part his naive engagements with the world. In his account of Mino's truncated dream life, Vacca implicitly maps the psyche/soma division directly onto the distinction between ego/id, revealing a profoundly binary approach to the self on every level, which devalues our sensual, bodily-identified, imagistic drives and energies and divorces them from our faculties of reason.

As a final contrast, I move away from fantasies of incorporeality to consider a highly sexualised female cyborg whose physical state results directly from a dangerous desire to move between mechanical spaces. I argue that her attraction lies in both her own bodily fusion of human and mechanical parts, and the possibility she offers others of experiencing this fusion, albeit temporarily, through sexual relations.

Techno Sex: Ammaniti's "Ferro"

Niccolo Ammaniti is one of the "Giovani cannibali" writers--a group formed in Italy in the 1990s whose "pulp fiction" approach to literature deliberately foregrounded drug culture, violence, vulgar language, and sexual activity. (22) "Ferro" is a rather crude tale whose young male narrator, tired of watching pornographic films alone, goes in search of bodily contact. His visions and fantasies of women are artificially enhanced, with impossibly pneumatic breasts, and he significantly refers to the desired body as "qualcosa" not "qualcuno," setting the scene for a posthuman encounter. Our anticipation mounts as he races his car through the streets of Rome, challenging other vehicles at traffic lights; his car becomes a mechanical realisation of his desired virility as he lives the futurist dream. Commenting on his 1996 screen adaptation of J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash, David Cronenberg described the car as a "mobile bedroom," a technological signifier of sexual performance that vitally consolidates modern masculinity. (23) Ammaniti's narrative exploits this omnipresent cultural association from the outset, initially presenting the car as an extension of the protagonist's sexual prowess. Subsequently, in an echo of the polyvalent eroticism expressed by the futurists, he fuses car, woman and man to allow the protagonist total domination of both technology and the female body, as well as an auto-erotic experience.

Our worst suspicions about the protagonist are confirmed as, having arrived at the Olympic Village where prostitutes circulate, he xenophobically dismisses prospective women of colour, preferring "una giovane ragazza bianca. Poco pratica ma esperta.... Provocante e timida" (305). When he finally locates a suitable individual, she takes him to a ramshackle house, where his attempts at sexual intercourse with her are thwarted by the appearance of her father who beats him and threatens him with a bread knife. However, it then transpires that contrary to appearances the father does indeed want the young man to have intercourse, but with his other daughter Piera who lives in the cellar. Terrified and reeling from the blows he has sustained, the protagonist is pushed down into the dim cellar where he comes upon the iron woman alluded to in the title.

Piera is a blinding vision of metal, with mechanical prostheses in place of arms and legs, a mass of chrome plates and microchips. At first, the narrator is afraid, seeing her as "Un terminator. Un cyborg" (315). However, upon closer inspection he notices that Piera's prosthetic body consists of German car technology--Porsche shock absorbers like those he has fitted on his own FIAT--and he becomes excited. Piera tells the story of the accident which left her in this state, and how she wants a child to keep her company. The protagonist needs no further encouragement, and jumps on top of her, negotiating her gears and steering. Piera's body becomes arousing to the protagonist when he recognises her technology and can align his attraction to her with his sexually charged relationship to his car. Rather appropriately, Piera's accident resulted from her obsessive practice of passing from one moving car to another, between interior and exterior spaces, linking her body temporarily with technology. When this temporary fusion is made permanent her relationship to her prosthetic body is glossed over as if it presented no problems whatsoever, as if she had achieved her desire.

This scene supports J. G. Ballard's prediction about the future of human sexual interaction when he asserts that

   organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area is
   becoming no longer possible.... What we're getting is a whole new
   order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of
   experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft,
   the whole overlay of new technologies.... (24)

Furthermore, Cronenberg argues that "we have already incorporated the car into our understanding of time, space, distance and sexuality. To want to merge with it literally in a more physical way seems a good metaphor. There is a desire to fuse with techno-ness." Ammaniti's story can be seen to realise this futurist romance, ending with an elopement as the narrator and Piera abscond from the house, pausing only to disable the antitheft device her father has fitted to her mechanical body. The final sentences look forward, giving a postmodern ironic twist to a hackneyed ending, anticipating a bright future where man and woman-machine live happily ever after. However, it cannot be denied that Piera's role in events is far from ideal. Her mechanised frame, treated as a personal commodity by her father, allows a conflation of woman and vehicle that the protagonist seems to have desired from the outset. Piera is literally a machine, a stark reification of woman as sex machine, or baby machine, the only two roles available to her. It is perhaps no accident--and is certainly in keeping with futurist pronouncements on women and desire--that the woman capable of arousing romance and instilling family values in a selfish, self-glorifying, serial exploiter of women, is partly mechanised.

What strikes me about this representation is that Piera experiences cyborg embodiment as an oppressing condition that confines her within a rigid notion of femininity. Woman becomes mechanised body, unable to move beyond her role as sexual object or reproductive entity. Although she attempts to flee her situation, Piera escapes from her pimping, neglectful father only as another man's possession; a man who will surely value her only as a sexual object. In a world where technology is as pervasive and ubiquitous a social force as gender hierarchies (Terry 3), we cannot escape the power of either, as Piera's experience demonstrates.

Haraway's manifesto was notable for its use of the cyborg as a transgressive emblem, as a multifaceted phenomenon used ironically to subvert the binary categories of contemporary culture. It is a contradictory figure that--if developed as she envisages--could potentially enable the collapse of totalizing theories and traditional hierarchies. For Haraway, the cyborg's very hybridity offers a way out of rigid gender categories, and was intended as emblematic of a new freedom in socialist-feminist movements. Indeed, Braidotti's introduction to the Italian translation of Haraway's manifesto hails the cyborg as an empowering challenge to technophobia and essentialist conceptions of femininity. (25) Despite the apparently transgressive nature of its content, however, Ammaniti's work reinforces an outdated, normative female role. Indeed, as if to compensate for any futuristic implications, the story is based on rather cliched fabular blueprints of the damsel in distress rescued by a manly hero. (26) However, rather than unravelling the ideological impetus of this narrative model, Ammaniti reinforces a misogynistic myth of female emancipation that serves only to transport the female in question from one location to another, without substantially altering her status. Works by the "Giovani cannibali" have been hailed as evoking "a transgressive sexuality that surpasses any possible taboo" (Antonello 42). Although some texts by the "cannibali" do indeed breach normative notions of sexuality, many, like Ammaniti's story, fit easily within a rather too well established tradition of female prostitution and male objectification of women. Notably, feminist critical engagements with the "cannibali" do problematize the misoginistic presentation of female characters by male authors. For example, Stefania Lucamante (102-03) observes that "women appear as favorite targets of men's rage, which manifests itself through ritual violence and casual sexual encounters," and that women are depicted as "pulpy" in that they hold no significance to the plot but "merely represent cheap merchandise."

Interestingly, the use of contemporary, postmodern features as a mask to reactionary, normative values has been identified as a widespread trend in contemporary science fiction comics and cyberpunk fiction. As Nicola Nixon argues in her essay "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" many such texts are

   in the end, not radical at all. [Their] slickness and apparent
   subversiveness conceal a complicity with 80s conservatism [or any
   other strand of conventional normativity] which is perhaps
   confirmed by the astonishing acceptance of the genre by such
   publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and
   the New York Times. (204)

Comparable phenomena can be identified in Italian cyberpunk comics, notably in Stefano Tamburini's character Ranxerox:

   un moderno Frankenstein costruito con i pezzi di una
   fotocopiatrice, che si aggira in una Roma degradata e
   apocalittica, assolutamente fantascientifica. Un golem di metallo
   e lattice, cinico e spietato, il cui unico punto debole e il suo
   amore "sintetico" per Lubna, una capricciosa e detestabile
   Lolita. (Stampa alternativa)

Images of the happy couple together show Lubna as small enough to be carried in one hand, and often semi-naked--a far cry from Haraway's vision of liberated female identity through interaction with cyborgs (fig. 2). Tamburini created Ranxerox in 1977 for the American inspired comic Cannibale, which he set up with Vincenzo Sparagna, Filippo Scozzari, Andrea Pazienza and Tanino Liberatore. The strip proved so popular that when Cannibale folded, Ranxerox's exploits were then serialised in its successor Frigidaire, established in 1980, and are published in France, America, and Japan among other countries. Ranxerox was created when "uno studelinquente proietta nel coatto costruito dalla fotocopiatrice rubata all'universita il proprio essere violento" (Stampa alternativa). He is described as representing "the depths of our Id [where] we see reflected the base parts of ourselves that would take what it wants with no compromise, no apology" (Corben).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Freud defines the id as chaotic, disorganised, primitive, illogical, contradictory, highly bodily, unaware of value judgements (good/evil, morality), dominated by the pleasure principle: in short, "instinctual cathexes seeking discharge--that, in our view, is all there is in the id" ("The Dissection of the Psychical Personality" 74). If the id is a source of unbridled energy--libido, anxiety, hatred and violence--then Ranxerox materially enacts the transfused id of his "studelinquente" creator. According to Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Ranxerox is "in grado di trasferirsi, senza brusche rotture, nei travestimenti dell'uomo primitivo o di quello spaziale e galattico" (201). Although he does not develop the point, Tondelli has incisively identified the simultaneously futuristic and brute nature of many cyborg characters--a further binary that reflects dualistic conceptions of ego/id, mapped unproblematically onto the psyche/soma pairing. Here as elsewhere no space is afforded for any holistic or even basically integrated approach to the self, despite Freud's own comments regarding the bodily ego. Ranxerox, like Ammaniti's protagonist, is driven by unmediated id, conforming to, rather than challenging Freud's definition, performing a male fantasy of a self liberated from the regulating influence of the ego. In a feminist analysis, these scenarios are striking for two reasons: first, for the way in which certain types of "instinctual" drive are presented as transcendent, as though some masculine "instincts" transcend the male bodies that are said to be their origin; second, for attempts to naturalise such instincts, thus asserting the inevitability of certain "male" behaviours. It must be remembered that although we think about the id as instinctual, it remains, nevertheless, deeply mediated by culture. Ranxerox and Ammaniti's protagonist can be seen to represent the id of patriarchal culture: their primitive misogyny masquerades as futuristic heroics, "keeping the boys satisfied" in an explorative realisation of the "libidinous" civilisation suggested by Marcuse as an alternative to repressive "technologised society." (27)

Conclusions

If "la letteratura fantastica tinge di raccontare una storia per poter raccontare altro" (Ceserani 37), that "altro" is not always obvious to its author, initial readers, or critics, but nevertheless insistently demands to be recognised. Indeed, often "it takes hard work not to see" the "alternative" stories woven into a narrative (Morrison 17). (28)

With this in mind, drawing together the analyses profiled in this article it seems that the fictional cyborg serves as a vehicle for two main, related areas of inquiry. First, cyborg characters enable authors to narrativize the relationship between mind and body in multitudinous ways. Second, they allow exploration of the ever-changing balance between ego and id, the effects of privileging of one over the other and/or severing their fundamental interrelatedness. Furthermore, it appears that characters looking to establish a relationship with a cyborg partner may do so in order to consolidate a particular (im)balance of rational/libidinal self. Many of the characters considered above are presented as experiencing their psychic and somatic selves as radically disconnected; a split echoed in depictions of ego/id as an opposition that can be easily mapped onto that of mind/body. As argued above, Ranxerox is presented as possessing no regulatory ego, and therefore unleashes the force of his unmediated id which has the effect of partially naturalising violent impulses. Ammaniti's protagonist privileges his (patriarchal) "instinctual" self, conveniently stumbling across a "donna-macchina" who proves a willing accomplice in his auto-erotic fantasies, consolidating his exploitative masculinity. Without the input of a bodily ego, their behaviours are frozen at the level of the "uomo primitivo" identified by Tondelli. Conversely, Mino erases his id completely, contemporaneously to his efforts, in time-honoured Cartesian fashion, to lose the treacherous weight of his body. Finally Laura's struggles show an attempt at reintegration of the fragmented self. She may be disembodied, but her rational self is overcome by violent impulses in a desperate attempt to regain the body through which a more balanced development of her psychic life might be achieved.

All cyborgs mentioned are the product of male fantasy: both that of the author and that of the male character who constructs them, or seeks them out. Caronia views the creation of artificial beings as "il tentativo di ripetere il processo di creazione della vita sotto il controllo completo dell'uomo, del tutto svincolato dalla naturalita." In light of this, woman, as "la depositaria di quel residuo di 'naturale'" that could impede the total realisation of the project, constitutes a threat which requires domination (Caronia, Il corpo virtuale 26). Paula's female sensuality and corporeal presence perturb Mino, whose energies are directed towards the (re)creation of his unsexed, electronic, autonomous self. Endriade (re)creates his former wife, depriving her of the technological reproductive abilities he has developed. The protagonist of "Ferro" is happy to settle with a female partner who we assume will bear children, but the extreme mechanisation of her body, and its conflation with the vehicle introjected into his own body image, mean that this reproduction enables a highly narcissistic form of reproduction.

As Bordo argues, Cartesian dualism effects a severing of relations between humans and nature both on an epistemological and an ontological level. This condition of detachment can be viewed through the lens of a "masculine" epistemology that reascribes the potential for creativity to the male (108). As suggested above, technological advance and the power of scientific experiment have the potential to achieve much the same result. Returning to my original questions, it is worth reflecting on the overall pattern emerging from the texts analysed in light of this reascription of creative power. Despite their markedly different experiences of embodiment, Laura, Paula and Piera perform the roles of traditional woman: they either strongly desire children or represent sensual fleshiness, and their bodies are always dominated or colonised by the masculine. In contrast, Endriade and Mino have creative agency, scientific power and the intellectual will to move beyond the biological human form by dispensing with corporeality, to varying degrees. Gender and sex roles are presented as inextricably pre-determined, in rigid binary opposition, and any hint of homosexual activity in the texts mentioned (Olga's naked dance in Il grande ritratto) is condemned as disgusting. Far from challenging normative values, then, these texts rely on and reinforce patriarchal social organisation, while depriving women of their unique ability to bear children--much in line with Lombroso's position. Perhaps the most transgressive aspect of any texts considered is Mino's desire to be castrated, to lose the male genitals that have come to symbolise patriarchal authority and dominance. However, even this decision is motivated by a desire to transcend what he sees as the cloying distraction of female identity.

Returning to the notion of the fantastic, Italo Calvino comments that authors of fantastic narrative--romantic and anti-romantic alike--were influenced by Rousseau's crisis of faith in the redemptive power of nature and the Enlightenment conte philosophique. As a result,

   il racconto fantastico nasce come sogno a occhi aperti
   dell'idealismo filosofico, con la dichiarata intenzione di
   rappresentare la realta del mondo interiore, soggettivo,
   dando a esso una dignita pari o maggiore a quella del mondo
   dell'oggettivita dei sensi. (1674-75)

A comparable break in the rapport with nature features strongly in the texts considered here, and interiority, especially the unconscious, plays a major part in the denouement of each text. However, whether intentionally or unintentionally, cyborg narratives reveal the importance of the body in psychic development, and function in part as a warning against detaching ourselves too definitively from our corporeality. If a key theme of fantastic literature is "il tema dello scienziato che sfida le leggi della natura finche una notte la sua audacia non viene messa a dura prova" (Calvino 1674), in cyborg narratives the break with nature means that this type of repercussion can be side-stepped. New laws are being forged in line with the forging of the masculine epistemology identified by Bordo, with the common effect of devaluing the body. At one extreme, this manifests itself in cyberfiction as a desire to lose one's body in cyberspace--a paradoxical flight from "feminine" corporeality to the virtual womb of the matrix, which derives etymologically from mater (Butler, Bodies That Matter 31). At the other extreme, in a recent theoretical text we find Mario Perniola's concept of a "sessualita neutra" that conceptualises our physical selves as "un corpo estraneo o meglio una veste estranea che non appartiene a nessuno" (13). In between, hegemonic masculinity exploits technologized or reviled female bodies, replacing biological coherence with fragmented technology. With regard to this fragmentation, Braidotti alerts us that, for example,

   the new reproductive technologies, by officializing the instrumental
   denaturalisation of the body, also institutionalize dismemberment
   as the modern condition, thus transforming the body into a factory
   of detachable pieces. (Nomadic Subjects 61)

Given the importance of embodied experience to psychic development, surely our impulse must be to resist the widespread onset of this condition. However, if we are to embrace technology as liberating and empowering, as Haraway and Braidotti would have us do, we need alternative literary images to fire our imagination and dismantle patriarchal ideologies. Rather than taking up where (discredited) theorists like Lombroso left off, science fiction, as shown by many feminist writers, (29) has the ability to such progressive alternative realities. What must be remembered, however, is that technology does not guarantee a new, more liberating and more inclusive moral framework.

This article has endeavoured to demonstrate the validity of performing a feminist analysis on cyborg narratives, and the importance of disentangling the ideologies coded into each work. It has shown that Italian cyborg narratives, dating both from the 1960s and 1990s are profoundly saturated with problematic discourses of gender, sex and sexuality, and that recent publications do not necessarily constitute any more of a challenge to normative values. As to why this might be the case in Italy when in other cultures such texts exist alongside a rapidly increasing number of works that subvert dominant norms, we might speculate that it is connected with the arguably rather traditional character of Italian culture and cultural production with regard to gender and sexuality in particular. Indeed, despite the activities and successes of feminism,

   Italy remains a country in which gender relations are still
   often formed in the mould of an underlying
   masculinism--old-fashioned or new-fashioned, covert or
   manifest--and this masculinism both sustains old traditions
   and invents new ones. (Passerini 157)

Indeed, even within academic institutions, responses to women's studies and gender studies have remained rather lukewarm, (30) due to cultural resistance to such discourses. The more widely recognized strands of science fiction writing remain the province of male authors who, as science fiction author Nicoletta Vallorani remarks, tend to depict women in reductive, stereotypical ways. (31) For Vallorani, the body is a key element of the genre since "nella fantascienza piu che altrove, il discorso sui generi passa attraverso il corpo." Referring to Haraway and cyberfeminism, she points out that "i saperi dicotomici non sono piu in grado, oggi, di dipanare il nodo dei rapporti tra i sessi. La questione e molto piu complessa; sicuramente nel mondo moderno non e piu possibile dividere il mondo in due meta." (32) In contrast to the stereotypical depictions of women and dualistic representations of the self that are common to much male authored cyborg fiction, feminist portrayals of cyborgs seek to problematize and disrupt such approaches to identity. Therefore, we might tentatively attribute the persistence of Cartesian approaches to the mind-body relation in Italian cyborg narratives to the relative absence of Italian cyber-feminist writers. Figures such as Vallorani constitute a vital presence on the Italian science fiction landscape, and any more sustained critical evaluation of this strand of Italian literature would need to address the impact of cyberfeminism on Italian narrative.

Italian cyborg narratives may not have received significant critical attention to date, Italian cultural production may be "forgotten" in Caronia and Tagliasco's work, and Italy's geographical space may tend to fall away in cyborg narratives, but the provocative nature of the few texts considered here must surely open the way for further critical commentary on the issues they raise, particularly with regard to sex and gender.

CHARLOTTE ROSS 

University of Birmingham 

Notes

(1) The definition derives from Donna Haraway's influential "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985, 152). See also Wolmark; Hayles; Terry and Calvert, for example.

(2) Although acknowledging the vast experiential differences between the life of a New Yorker and a peasant in Chiapas, Caronia still asserts, without problematising the issue, that "il nostro immaginario, quello occidentale, detti legge al livello mondiale, al pari della nostra economia" (Il cyborg 9). He does not specify what role he attributes to the Italian culture and economy in what many would consider a process of global American hegemony, both cultural and economic.

(3) "Manifesto del Futurismo" (1909, 7-14) and "Uuomo molteplice e il regno della macchina" (1915) in Marinetti, F. T. Marinetti 7-14; 297-301. For an account of cultural engagements with our complex relationship to the car, see Attilio Brilli, La vita che corre.

(4) Cited from the online article "Is Metal to Flesh Like Masculine to Feminine?"

(5) Liana Borghi's Italian translation of this text was published by Feltrinelli in 1995, with an introduction by Rosi Braidotti.

(6) For a critical approach to Descartes' theories informed by feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural history, see Bordo.

(7) My understanding of "gender" is informed by the work of North American feminists, in particular some now classic texts by Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble). Rubin argues that in the "sex/gender" system, both sex and gender are "constituted by the imperatives of social systems" and function to assert and reinforce heterosexual dependency between the sexes. Butler argues that sex, gender and sexuality are discursively produced through reiterative "performative" behaviours that, over time, produce an effect of identity (Gender Trouble).

(8) Similarly to Caronia's work, this anthology, edited by Solmi et al. consists of translations of Anglophone science fiction.

(9) The "over-automatization" of perception stems from habitual, automatic apprehension of an object "as though it were enveloped in a sack" (Shlovsky 17).

(10) Although some forms of Derridian deconstruction argues for the endless freeplay of the signifier, I subscribe to the view that a text will encourage certain readings more than others. With regard to feminist messages within a text, for example, these need to be strongly signalled since the default modes of reading and making sense of our culture are saturated with patriarchal norms.

(11) See Doane, and Huyssen (70 et passim).

(12) On "compulsory heterosexism," see Rich, and Butler (Gender Trouble).

(13) Although both Freud and Charcot concluded that hysteria affects both men and women, "many doctors, untouched by Charcot's professional scepticism and attempting to break the link between hysteria and the female sex, painted a portrait of the hysteric's symptoms as the pathological version of the weaknesses and failings to which the entire female sex were condemned" (Appignanesi 66).

(14) Moravec is a former director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie-Mellon University.

(15) See Bordo, "Purification and Transcendence in Descartes' Meditations," in The Flight to Objectivity 75-95.

(16) One of the few articles that confronts issues of gender and sexuality in Buzzati's works (although not in Il grande ritratto) is Danielle Hipkins's "Evil Ambiguities."

(17) With regard to the male generic, Caronia finds himself entangled in a telling situation: describing a female cyborg as having taken on the aspect of "l'uomo," be backtracks furiously: "L'uomo inteso come essere umano, naturalmente, perche Deidre [la cyborg], come si e visto, e una donna" (Il Cyborg 42-43). As suggested by Lepschy, there is an implicit sexism inherent in the use of "uomo" as an unmarked term designating both men and women (Lepschy 124-25).

(18) Buzzati, Natura crudele; qtd. in Bertoldin 67.

(19) "Biological femaleness is not enough" but must be supplemented by "a willing demonstration of difference" (Brownmiller 2-3). In a similar vein, some of Franca Rame's monologues satirically attack the misogynistic culture that shackles, technologises, cuts, lifts, colours, and imprisons women's bodies in order to render them sufficiently "feminine": see especially "Alice nel paese senza meraviglie" and "Ho fatto la plastica."

(20) Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); qtd. in Bordo 105.

(21) I use the word "mother" not as the generic default for "parent" as historically employed by many psychoanalytic texts that indulge varying degrees of biological essentialism, but to refer deliberately to the female other whose reproductive powers and difference challenge male domination (Huyssen 70-72).

(22) See the collection of "cannibale" stories edited by Daniele Brolli, and critical responses to the work in Lucamante. The introductions to both texts provide helpful and stimulating definitions of the group and their writing.

(23) Rodley xvi. See also Grosz: "External objects, implements and instruments with which the subject continually interacts become, while they are being used, intimate, vital and even libidinally cathected parts of the body image. These objects and implements need not be small ... jets, ships and cars are all capable of becoming part of the body image" (80). She draws on Paul Schilder's 1978 text The Image and Appearance of the Human Body.

(24) Interview by Peter Linnett, Corridor 5 (1974); qtd. in Springer 34.

(25) "Basta con le immagini sdolcinate che esaltano la potenza materna creatrice; viva la donna trasgressiva, ne etero, ne omo, ma in movimento costante, nomade nella vita. Abbasso la paranoia un po' indolente di quelle che sanno solo scatenarsi contro la tecnologia, le macchine e la musica d'oggi. Noi sappiamo difenderci, anche con il computer: chela forza del femminismo venga dalle cyberfemministe!"

(26) Interestingly other "giovani cannibali" authors use the same technique (in a similarly problematic way): see, for example, Luttazzi. This little red riding hood is dismembered by an unscrupulous wolf of a P.R., only to spring back to life cartoon-like as if violence done to women were reversible, and served mainly to provide titillating narrative. The story also implies that "she asked for it."

(27) Marcuse does not specify how this type of society could be sustained, but the idea has proved influential, notably in the student movements of the 1960s (Kennedy 74-75).

(28) Morrison is arguing that "the fabrication of the Africanist persona [by white authors] is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self." Just so, the fabrication of female characters by male authors, and cyborg characters, often reveal more about their devisers than about themselves.

(29) See, for example, Piercy, Body of Glass, a feminist science fiction novel that probes the ethics of sexual interaction between humans and cyborgs, taking a rather different approach to the authors considered here.

(30) See Di Cori and Barazzetti, Gli studi delle donne in Italia, especially Paola Di Cori, "Atena uscita dalla testa di Giove."

(31) Vallorani's science fiction publications include Il cuore finto di DR, Dream Box, I misti du Sur, and Darjee.

(32) See Gomma.

WORKS CITED

Ammaniti, Niccolo. "Ferro." Fango. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. 301-17.

Antonello, Pierpaolo. "Cannibalizing the Avant-Garde." Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovanni Cannibali Writers. Ed. and trans. Stefania Lucamante. London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 38-56.

Appignanesi, Lisa, and John Forrester. Freud's Women. London: Penguin, 2000.

Bertoldin, Tiziana. "Tecnica, modernita e natura nell'immaginario di Dino Buzzati." Studi buzzatiani. Rivista del Centro Studi Buzzati. Anno V. Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici interuazionali, 2000. 47-68.

Bontempelli, Massimo. Minnie la candida. Opere scelte. Ed. Luigi Baldacci. Milan: Mondadori, 1978. 691-746.

Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State U of New York R 1987.

Braidotti, Rosi. "Is Metal to Flesh like Masculine to Feminine." http://www.chairetmetal. com/cm06/braidotti.htm.

--. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Brolli, Daniele, ed. Gioventu cannibale. Turin: Einaudi, 1996.

Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. London: Paladin, 1986.

Brilli, Attilio. La vita che corre: mitologia dell'automobile. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

--. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Buzzati, Dino. Il grande ritratto. Milan: Mondadori, 1960.

Calvino, Italo. "Il fantastico nella letteratura italiana." Saggi 1945-1985. Vol. 2. Ed. Mario Barenghi. 2nd ed. Milan: Mondadori, 1999. 1672-82.

Caronia, Antonio. Il corpo virtuale: dal corpo robotizzato al corpo disseminato nella rete. Padua: Muzzio, 1996.

--. Il cyborg: saggio sull'uomo artificiale. Milan: ShaKe, 2001.

Cavallini, Giorgio. Buzzati: il limite dell'ombra. Rome: Studium, 1997.

Ceserani, Remo. Le radici storiche di un modo narrativo. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983.

Corben, Richard. "Ranxerox in New York." July 1984. http://ripfiles.e-workers.de/ archiv/harhar/.

Crotti, Ilaila. Buzzati. Florence: Il Castoro, La nuova Italia, 1977.

Di Cori, Paola, and Donatella Barazzetti, eds. Gli studi delle donne in Italia: una guida critica. Rome: Carocci, 2001.

Di Cori, Paola. "Atena uscita dalla testa di Giove. Insegnare 'studi delle donne' e 'di genere' in Italia." Di Coil and Barazzetti, eds. 15-44.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Technophilia." Wolmark 20-33.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Ego and the Id." 1923. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage, 2001. 19-27.

--. "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality." 1933. The Standard Edition. Vol. 22. London: Vintage, 2001. 57-80.

Gomma. "Fantascienza e tecnologia." http://www.mediamente.rai.it/home/tv2rete/ mm9899/99063104/s990602.htm 15 June 2004.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Hables Gray, Chris, with Heidu Figuieroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor, eds. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." 1985. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. London: Free Association Books, 1991. 149-81.

--. Manifesto cyborg. Donne, tecnologie e biopolitiche del corpo. Trans. Liana Borghi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Hipkins, Danielle. "Evil Ambiguities: The Fantastic Flight from Interpretation in Dino Buzzati's Il deserto dei Tartari and Paola Capriolo's Early Fiction." Spunti e ricerche 13: Special Issue on Dino Buzzati (1998): 81-98.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Kennedy, Roger. Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Libido. Cambridge: Icon, 2001.

Lepschy, Giulio. "Language and Sexism." Women and Italy." Essays on Gender and Culture and History. Ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Shirley W. Vinall. London: Macmillan, 1991. 117-38.

Levi, Primo. "Il servo." Vizio di forma. Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Opere I. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. 710-17.

Lombroso, Cesare. La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale. Turin: Roux, 1893.

Longo, Giuseppe, O. Il nuovo Golem. Baris: Laterza, 1998.

--. Homo technologicus. Rome: Meltemi, 2001.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Polity Press, 1991.

Lucamante, Stefania. "Everyday Consumerism and Pornography 'Above the Pulp Line.'" Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovanni Cannibali Writers. Ed. and trans. Stefania Lucamante. London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 98-134.

Luttazzi, Daniele. "Cappuccetto splatter." Gioventu cannibale. Ed. Daniele Brolli, Turin: Einandi, 1996. 63-68.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964.

Marinetti, F. T. Mafarka il futurista. 1909. Milan: Casa Editrice Sonzogno, 1911.

--. F. T. Marinetti: teoria e invenzione futurista. Ed. Luciano De Maria. Milan, Mondadori, 1983.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Message. New York: Bantam, 1967.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Nixon, Nicola. "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" Wolmark 191-207.

Passerini, Luisa. "Gender Relations." Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley. Oxford: Oxford UPs, 1996. 144-59.

Peppoloni, Stefano, and Michele Mordente, ed. Stefano Tamburini. Perugia: Edizioni Art Corea, 1997; cited at http://web.fiscali.it/no-redirect-tiscali/stevetamburo/t@mb/tmix0.htm.

Perniola, Mario. Il sex appeal dell'inorganico. Turin: Einaudi, 1994.

Piercy, Marge. Body of Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

Roda, Vittorio. I fantasmi della ragione: fantastico, scienza e fantascienza nella letteratura italiana fra Otto e Novecento. Naples: Liguori, 1996.

Rame, Franca. "Alice nel paese senza meraviglie." Le commedie di Dario Fo. Vol. 8. Turin: Einaudi, 1989.97-104.

--. "Ho fatto la plastica." Le commedie di Dario Fo. Vol. 9. Turin: Einaudi, 1991. 165-72.

Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Feminisms. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 320-24.

Rodley, Chris. "Interview with David Cronenberg." Sight and Sound (June 1996). Repr. David Cronenberg. Crash. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Towards an Anthropology of Women. Ed. R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review P, 1975.

Rycroft, Charles. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1995.

Scott Sorensen, Anne. "Approaches to the Internet and the Genre of Chatting--Community, Identity and Discourse." Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Between Narration and Sociotechnical Reality. Working Paper no. 1, University of Southern Denmark, 2001.

Shlovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwells, 2000. 17-23.

Solmi, Sergio, and Carlo Fruttero, ed. Le meraviglie del possibile: antologia della fantascienza. Turin: Einaudi, 1959.

Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy. London: U of Minnesota E 1996.

Springer, Claudia. "Pleasure of the Interface." Wolmark 34-54.

Stampa Alternativa: http://www.stampalternativa.it/pagine/schede/Eretica/novita61.htm.

Tagliasco, Vincenzo. Dizionario degli esseri umani fantastici e artificiali. Milan: Mondadoff, 1999.

Terry, Jennifer, and Melodie Calvert, ed. Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 1997.

Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. Un weekend postmoderno. Milan: Bompiani, 1990.

Vacca, Roberto. Il robot e il computer. 1963. Milan: Rizzoli, 1974.

Vallorani, Nicoletta. Il cuore finto di DR. 1992. Milan: Mondadori, 1993.

--. Dream Box. Milan: Mondadori, 1997.

--. I misti du Sur. Rome: ADN Kronos, 1998.

--. Darjee. Rome: ADN Kronos, 1999.

Verdone, Mario. Il movimento futurista. Rome: Lucarini, 1986.

Wolmark, Jenny, ed. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999.