Posthuman Bodies in the Making: Woman and Technology in The Girl Who Was Plugged In

It has long been thought of ‘a world governed by technology’ as part of an unreached future. Nevertheless, the current reality is, in many aspects, a manifestation of what the works of science fiction once foresaw. The rapprochement between the content of this genre and its reification begs the question of survival, or rather, the shape of survival in a technological world. Hence, this article is an endeavor to reflect the influence of technology demonstrated in James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973) on reality. To reach this end, the novella is regarded from a posthumanist prism with the aim of speculating the meaning and the making of the female mind and body in the Age of Machine. The paper also evokes aspects from the feminist and Marxist schools in relating facts with fiction to reflect upon the speculative dimension of the science fiction genre insofar as the schools provide a profound insight into the realistic social features that can be found in literary texts. The textual analysis reveals that technology feeds humans’ superficiality towards the female consciousness and physique, which is manifested in areas related to beauty standards, consumption, and love, and interferes with redefining the human by detaching the mind from the body.