WHEN SNOW ISN'T WHITE
by Barbara Browning

Cyborgs are not of woman born -- nor do they get pregnant. As Donna Haraway writes:

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.(73)

Cyborgs don't dream of the perfect wedding, nor of future generations. They don't procreate -- they regenerate. But that doesn't mean they can't be sexy. Many of us, in fact, are having sex not in order to get pregnant. But what of that other component of sexual exchange which now impinges on our organic pleasures: Do cyborgs, too, have to worry about AIDS?

I'm going to chart here a figural strand -- of sex and viruses -- from the "real" virtual world into a fiction which seems uncannily more familiar than reality. In the last decade, the global AIDS pandemic has forced us to reconfigure our ways of thinking about both individual and group identity. The ostensibly preventative mechanism of "risk group" epidemiology requires us to locate ourselves within or without the national, racial and sexual communities most profoundly impacted by the virus. But HIV has, precisely by crossing communities, begged the question of the way we categorize populations, and see ourselves as identifiable, even unto ourselves. Simultaneously, racial and sexual identity appear to be breaking down in another universe of "promiscuous communication" and border crossing: cyberspace.

When it was first hypothesized in the early 80s, whether by William Gibson's Neuromancer or by the theoretical propositions of cyber enthusiasts like Donna Haraway, cyberspace appeared to be the allegorical representation of a simultaneously utopian and dystopian world of undecidable identity. And yet as people, particularly young people, have gotten increasingly "wired," as the technologies of electronic communication have spread, the fictions and theories of cybernetic identity are becoming embodied, and real. The cyborg is a postulation of a hybrid of machine and organism. And as Haraway argues:

In the traditions of "Western" science  and politics -- the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as a resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self -- from the reflections of the other -- the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and the imagination.(66)

The imagined reconfiguration of the boundary between nature and technology, in other words, also brings into question other boundaries: those between genders, races and cultures. And although Haraway published her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" in 1985, when this reconfiguration had been most fully articulated in fiction (most particularly by Gibson), she predicted that even this distinction -- between fiction and non-fiction -- would soon be swallowed by the organic machine it had created.

Haraway's "Manifesto" marked a significant moment in American feminist thought, and it is the feminist implications in particular which I want to consider through figures of identity. I want here to sketch out -- admittedly in a very schematic and reductive way -- the terrain, in the recent past, of American feminist thought on female identity. Besides being reductive, this account will be terminologically heavy-handed, as I am trying to work toward a particular metaphor. But my hope is that the pay-off for heavy-handedness will be a useful if primitive tool for conceptualizing new ways of thinking about identity.

First, some simple definitions: a thesis is something you put forth , an idea which you thrust, as it were, into the world. An antithesis is what is offered in opposition to a prior thesis. A synthesis is the bringing together of thesis and antithesis. A hypothesis is a proposal which comes under a more grounded premise of reality -- an alternative , imagined one which, if proven valid, might slip into our notion of reality, like a hypodermic needle slips under the skin. A prosthesis is something put forth (or on) in addition to the body, or perhaps more properly the self. The figure of thrusting is not one which I have inserted into or attached onto the word thesis -- it can be seen as etymologically implied. I've just extended the metaphor a bit to bring out its phallic quality. And certainly one could argue -- as it has been argued -- that some of the most influential theses on the constitution of human identity are masculinist in slant, and fail to accommodate for women's role in that constitution, even as they claim universality.

In the 70s boom of Women's Studies in this country, feminist scholarship and theory might be characterized as antithetical to the totalizing theses of patriarchal history, material culture and the family romance. Feminists were concerned with establishing the validity of women's cultural productions, and they accomplished this by arguing for the validity of women's experience -- especially in relation to their bodies. Women's cyclical nature, the roundness of their bodies, the circularity of their narratives, the blood-nurturing of their poetry -- all of these were offered in opposition to masculine linearity, and in that contrast were shown to good effect.

Subsequently, in the 80s, we began to find that the feminist configuration of "women's experience" was in some ways as limiting to us as individuals as exclusion had been before. "Essentialism," we called it -- an assumption that by virtue of our bodies we were living the same way in the world. Clearly, this wasn't so. And women of color added the trenchant argument that race and class had as much to do with "women's experience" as being female. Sexual orientation, age, nationality -- all of these needed to be factored in as well. We began to see that old "universal feminine" as something not essential to our nature, but constructed, just as misogynistic definitions had been constructed before. Sexual identity, we then said, can be nothing but a construction -- therefore, let us construct ours strategically. And this phase might be seen as a moment of feminist adoption of the synthetic . We put our identity together piece by piece, like a Frankenstein monster.

The present moment brings us to what I want to call, in this heavy-handed way, a moment in feminist theory both hypothetical and prosthetic . Female identity, whether essentialist or constructed, still has its pitfalls. Postcolonial theory is demanding that we acknowledge that racial and cultural identity themselves can't be delimited. Global culture is now too hybridized: our cultures have all infected one another, as if through dirty needles. If we can acknowledge that race, class, sexual orientation, and nationality -- among other things -- are not even fixed points which might help us specify female identity, then how useful or how meaningful can the group identity, "female", be? It still brings us back to the body. But community needs to be hypothesized , without assuming literal identity. Now, we want to say: I may have a uterus, but who determined that I was a woman? Why should my body determine my identity? Rather, I see my sex as a working hypothesis, and I manipulate my body in the world, like my prosthesis.

Inflatable voodoo doll

Julian Dibbell documented a prosthetic slippage between the fictional and the "real" in a 1993 article in the Village Voice called, "A Rape in Cyberspace; Or, How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." And it was precisely Dibbell's argument that the shifting from fiction to reality was more fluid than he had suspected which provoked a storm of controversy within the cyber community.

"Reality" here both should and should not remain in scare quotes -- that is, should and should not be read with irony -- because it operates on two levels. The reality described by Dibbell was real people using real computers, real modems and real communications networks for the purposes of "socializing." And yet the society created by these real people was, in an obvious way, fictional: made up of language, and subject to no particular laws of nature. Dibbell tells the story of a MOO (a "Multi-user dimension, Object-Oriented" -- an architecturally imagined and specified internet "chat space") populated by the electronic manifestations of a geographically far-flung assortment of mostly college and graduate students. One prominent denizen of the MOO appeared as "legba, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses."(239)

legba, we later learn, was the MOO manifestation of a white female graduate student in Seattle, who set her trickster spirit in motion by typing at a keyboard. But one Monday evening as she typed away, she found legba utterly out of her control, manipulated by an electronic "voodoo doll" in the hands of an "evil clown" MOO inhabitant called "Mr. Bungle." Bungle, in reality a student of the New York University Computing Facility, was entering instructions to a sub-program which would attribute acts and actions to other MOO inhabitants independent of their "will":

And thus a woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the MOO attached her to a character she called Starsinger, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the words "As if against her will, Starsinger jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly in the distance." And thus the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called legba, with a view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which legba, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of degradation all-too customarily reserved for the embodied female.(242)

Dibbell came upon this story in the virtual world of the MOO, but as a journalist followed its trail back into the real world, through the more old-fashioned kind of communication via telephone wires. In a phone interview, the woman whose Haitian effigy had been attacked told Dibbell that in the wake of the incident "posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting."(242)

Dibbell goes on to deduce from this experience that the "disembodied enactment of life's most body-centered activity" forces one to acknowledge that sex is always more psychic than physical -- which does nothing to reduce its power. "I know, I know," Dibbell writes, "you've read Foucault and your mind is not quite blown by the notion that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as it is an exchange of signs."(243-44) Still, the experience of cybersex is "full-bodied" -- particularly when virtually all participants are young people "in the grip of hormonal hurricanes" which set both real and virtual experiences spinning.

The major ethical questions raised in Dibbell's account are not merely civility and censorship on the internet, but crimes of sexual assault and capital punishment. Ultimately, after extensive debate within the MOO community, Bungle was "toaded" -- his account wiped out, which Dibbell compares to execution. Of course, the NYU student didn't actually die. He went over to the computing center, filled out a form, got a new account, and reappeared under a new but recognizable fictive identity. 1"Mr. Bungle had risen from the grave."

The metaphor of execution, however, didn't provoke anxiety. The flurry of controversy which took place shortly after publication of this article, both in print and on the internet, was concerned with Dibbell's use of the term "rape," which many felt trivialized the experience of victims of real sexual violence. "Feminist pornographer" Lisa Palac, however, entered an on-line argument in Dibbell's defense:

I can't tell you how often I am interviewed by reporters who are under the assumption that taking on an online identity is "risk-free." And that for some reason, going online will be free from the social/cultural shapes as we know them.... [The subject of] this article may be extreme, but it disproves the "all is safe in cyberspace" notion.(259)

I myself am less bothered by the suggestion that sexual violence can take place in virtual reality than by the implication that no matter what sexual (as well as racial and cultural) transformations they may effect in their electronic manifestations, it is always real women who are susceptible to violent penetration.

Sexually transmitted identities

What difference does gender make in cyberspace? And what happens when you go there in drag? Is your sexual fate always as delimited as legba's? And is that fate somehow tied to your racial and ethnic identity as well? The MOO which Dibbell described was purely textual, but there are subscription on-line entertainment services which currently allow users to "construct" pictorial images of themselves, and these images can socialize in chat rooms. You can choose your hair and skin color, shape of face, eye color and shape, etc. You can also "spice up" your language by adding the range of affective diacritical codes recognized on the internet: smiley faces, frowning faces, winking faces. These, you are told, can let people know your mood ("happy, sad, surprised,... even sarcastic") 2in a way that simple language doesn't. But the primary choice you have to make is your gender. This isn't expressed as a "choice" -- although we're all aware a good deal of transsexuality goes on on the internet. The relationship between your on-line hair, face shape, eyes, happy expression, and of course genitalia -- and your real world self can be read as either a hypothetical, imagined identity or a prosthetic one -- one which is an extension of your "real" self. Unless your "real" self turns out to be both hypothetical and prosthetic.

Despite Haraway's hopefulness, the virtual public at large is less willing to allow for total free-play of gender. Gender-switching may be an acknowledged aspect of virtual reality, but when addressed it often provokes more anxiety than celebration of new freedom. Even more disturbing to people, as evidenced by Dibbell's story, is the possibility of the loss of control over one's own virtual body.

Part of that terror of loss of control seems to be related to the new fear attached to real rape in recent years: the fear of infection. If cyborgs are the technological infected with the human, the male infected with the female, the West infected with the non-West, as Haraway optimistically prophesied, then, to return to my opening question, should cyborgs be worried about sexually transmitted diseases? Amid all this infection, can they get AIDS?

Allison Fraiberg has argued that the discourse of AIDS has been shaded by theoretical propositions on the postmodern networking of information, capital and bodies -- and vice versa. Whether in the Jamesonian mode of making the best of a bad situation or Haraway's mode of celebration, postmodern theory bears a remarkable resemblance to epidemiology. Fraiberg marks a transition from the nostalgic desire for the organic integrity of the individual, through a newly complicated notion of morality in an intimate, complicit world, into a new kind of bodily closure, which acknowledges people's and populations' interconnectedness: "The realities of AIDS dissolve the boundaries of the discrete body, and the cyborg, still needy for connection, integrates it into its discursive network."(10)

Fraiberg puns on the notion of discrete bodies, which are subsequently translated into discreet bodies: morality is imposed at the surface, at the point of visibility. But indiscretion , in the sense of an understanding of interconnectedness, allows for a responsible, one might even say civil, recuperation of bodily closure through latex barriers and clean needles. These aren't merely more realistic, effective preventative measures than sermons on family values -- they are actually part of a reconfiguration of bodily identity. And Fraiberg links this configuration to Haraway's proposition of a cyborg ontology as feminist political model.

The question, then, which I posed above -- can cyborgs get AIDS -- might be rearticulated as: can a virus be infected with a virus? To say that the cyborg is infection made manifest (and to imply that the literally infected body is cybernetic) is not to make it monstrous. The figure of contagion can animate the body.

Prosthetic politicization

I want to move into the realm of fiction to see how these figural confluences have been worked out in a model which, ironically, seems more real, more familiar, than Dibbell's real life MOO. In Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash , cyberspace is called the Metaverse -- and it appears to be an alternative world to an over-commercialized, unbearably restrictively brand-name real world. In the Metaverse, there is still "public" space, but like in L.A., people enter it prosthetically, through "avatars" :

Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. (36)

But in the Street you also see a lot of "regular" people. There are loads of straight couples out on dates. Those who don't have particularly sophisticated computer systems and don't know how to program their own avatars have to get standard types:

Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel the breeze. (37)

Clint is also "limited," although Stephenson doesn't give you the graphic details of Clint's lack of graphic detail. Why are women in particular marked as prosthetic? The simulated Brandy calls up the image of "real" simulated breasts. What she makes you look at is the prosthetic nature of real women's lives. By that I don't mean literal prosthetic breasts. But the "necessity" of implants -- prostheses for women who haven't necessarily lost any limbs -- points to women's habitual forced confrontation with the added-on nature of bodies.

Clint isn't Brandy's only counterpart. She has a more radical one in the character of Y.T. Y.T. first appears not in the Metaverse but in the "real" street. The car of the hero protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, has been "pooned. As in harpooned" by a "person on a skateboard," a Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. The poon is an electromagnet on an arachnofiber line and Y.T. is hitching a ride. Hiro is outraged by the Kourier's balls. "What a prick!...He is going to shake this scum, whatever it takes" (14-15). But it's Hiro who crashes, and Y.T. comes to the rescue, offering to complete his pizza delivery. "'Where's it going?' someone says. A woman.... The Kourier is not a man, it is a young woman. A fucking teenaged girl" (16).

Y.T. is literally a fucking teenaged girl. She is fifteen and fully sexually active . And she seems to have taken her sexuality into her own hands. Y.T. enters the narrative, as it were, in drag. Not just because she is dressed in a body-obscuring coverall and helmet. Her physical daring -- (and literal drag) -- throws off both Hiro and you. Her world is a dangerous world -- replete with STDs. In fact, these aren't sexually transmitted diseases, but Serious Tire Damage booby-traps which she has to maneuver her way around, a mile a minute. Or are they sexually transmitted diseases?

Y.T.'s world is dangerous in the same mundane and dead serious way that Brandy's world is dangerous. If science fiction was once perceived as a utopian genre pointing toward the future, the near -future of Snow Crash has some familiar -- in fact intensified -- problems. Herpes is one of the more benign examples. AIDS is clearly more serious. But there's more. Racism foments in the New South Africa franchises, and sexism is as bad as it ever was. Everywhere Y.T. goes, she's pursued by gawkers and lascivious Metacops. When a couple of them threaten to strip-search her, though, she's unintimidated. That's because Y.T. has her own prosthesis: her "dentata."

Sexism isn't just rampant on the street, or the Street. Even the famous, sophisticated programmer Juanita Marquez, who designed the technology which made possible truly life-like facial expressivity in the Metaverse, has to contend with it:

at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. (57)

Scientific sexism, like epidemiological racism, is virulent -- like a virus. You can't see it, but it proliferates.

The "hard" sciences, including both computer science and biology, continue to resist self-consciousness about their own sexist and racist constructs, despite the impressive documentation of feminist critics. [3] That's because of the illusion of objectivity when we speak not of people, or groups of people, but of bytes and cells. In Snow Crash , Stephenson keeps reminding you that computer science is based on binary codes. It functions by dichotomies -- can only make order by maintaining them. What makes a program crash is a virus, which disrupts the binary code, in much the same way that a human virus disrupts the genetic code of a cell.

A computer virus is a metaphor, at least prior to the fictional fusion of informational and bio-technologies recounted in Snow Crash . And the source of the metaphor is AIDS. In a 1988 New York Times article, the chairman of the Computer Virus Industry Association, Kenneth P. Weiss, made this clear in his description of the challenges to informational hygiene: "The most stringent [protection] procedures -- telling people not to touch other people's computers or to use public domain software -- is a little like telling people not to have sex in order to stop the spread of AIDS" (Kurtzman 178). Interestingly, it is the AIDS epidemic's challenge to individual and group identity which puts pressure on scientific discourse's false oppositions.

Disrupting binarism, of course, is what contemporary feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory are all about. Poststructural politicization of all stripes is about this kind of disruption of order. Snow Crash marks a catastrophic moment in the struggle to deconstruct patriarchal, Western, corporate order. "Snow Crash" is itself both a human and a computer virus -- because it refuses to acknowledge a difference between reality and virtual reality. That is only one of the dichotomies which it deconstructs. Like Haraway's cyborg, the human/machine-disrupting bug allows for all kinds of other disruptions to take place. The danger of the "metavirus" is that it makes it possible for other viruses to proliferate, creating chaos. And lesser viruses, which were previously of little threat, become especially malignant. The software-generated "Librarian" who guides Hiro Protagonist on his path to understanding the significance of Snow Crash reminds him that viruses have been around for a long time. He traces the notion to Sumerian mythology, and Asherah, the promiscuous consort of El, or Yahweh. Her worshipers participated in a cult of prostitution. "'Bingo,'" observes Hiro. "'Great way to spread a virus.'" The Librarian suggests her lineage:

"you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them.... Herpes simplex might be a modern, benign descendant of Asherah."

"Not always benign," Hiro says, remembering a friend of his who died of AIDS-related complications; in the last days, he had herpes lesions from his lips all the way down his throat. "It's only benign because we have immunities." (230-31)

Asherah was purged from religious tradition by the deuteronomists  ("Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists."), who codified social behavior in a book of the Pentateuch. Textual codification constituted "informational hygiene." But in the age of electronic communication, textuality has torn open like a bad condom. There's no way to control information from leaking everywhere. In this way, we're seeing something like the oral tradition, which Hiro likens to "sharing needles" (230).

Asherah spread the virus through sexual fluids, and through breastmilk to her adopted human off-spring. She even infected Enki, her son, the very principle of order, who according to the Sumerians created the me , the basis for social order. Me might also be read as "me" -- the first person, individual identity, distinguishable from others. The inherent infection of Western identity from its mythological beginnings gives one a clue as to where this reading is going.

Despite the deuteronomists, it is precisely the Christian Right who turns out to be behind the plot to propogate Snow Crash. L. Bob Rife, corporate head of Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain, is an all too familiar character. His employees are under 24-hour surveillance for "unacceptable lifestyle choices" like sodomy. But he's running around with hypodermic needles filled with fresh, warm tainted blood serum. Here, the heavy hand is Stephenson's, but the subtler point behind the blunt political irony of corporate Christianity behind a plague spread by infected bodily fluids is that even the most "orderly" of contemporary "lifestyle choices" is already infected with others.

Being prepared

Hiro Protagonist is a hacker, a promiscuous interfacer in the Metaverse, so his risk of contamination is through on-line contact. Despite his racial marking as a product of sexually crossed communities (he is African-Asian American), his own trespasses are electronic. But Y.T. is indiscrete, and indiscreet, about her "real world" sexual partners, so her risk factor is bodily fluids. She almost gets jabbed by the High Priest with a hypodermic needle, but she manages to zap him with a can of neon-green Liquid Knuckles and make her escape. That action scene, however, rings less true to the realities of Y.T.'s life than a much more banal one -- a very familiar one to plenty of adolescent female readers. She's having her coverall unzipped by a muscle-bound, tongue-kissing hulk named Raven:

Then he's in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her butt again, this time his hot skin against hers, it's like sitting on a warm buttered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer.

There's something she's supposed to remember at this point. Something she has to take care of. Something important. One of those dreary duties that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at moments like this, seems so utterly beside the point that it never even occurs to you.

It must be something to do with birth control. Or something like that. But Y.T. is helpless with passion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and kicks her knees until the coverall and her panties have slid down to her ankles. (381)

She's not thinking about Snow Crash. But, despite her "helpless" state of passion, she's perfectly cognizant of the risk of pregnancy. And of AIDS.

What does pregnancy have to do with AIDS? Everything. Hiro interprets the Sumerian myth of Enki's semen as the source of the earth's waters:

"To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water -- his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish." (258)

Benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. But to a fifteen-year-old girl, those sperm are anything but benevolent. 4The assumption of the benevolence of sperm is rife (as in L. Bob) in scientific writing, as Emily Martin has observed. 5This is the very unself-conscious, "virulent" sexism of the sciences which is remarked early on in Snow Crash . It's related to the notion of semen as the carrier of me , of individual identity, which irrigates the earth and brings forth life.

Y.T. has some serious dangers in her life. "Serious Tire Damage" is the least of her worries. But are sexually active women under siege? Paula Treichler has commented on the figuring in AIDS scientific literature of the vagina as a weak fortress, full of "fissures" and openings where the virus can get in. 6Martin notes that the militaristic rhetoric extends to descriptions of the immune system itself, where cells are distinguished from one another according to the sophistication of their "weaponry" -- and not surprisingly, this is put in gender-marked terms. The T-4 "killer" cells are the "Rambos" or "Mr. Ts" of the immune system, zapping foreign intruders with metaphorical firearms. The macrophages are the less fancy defenders: the "drudges" and "housekeepers" of the immune system, they "mop up" messy germs. 7

Women may be under siege, but it's as much by scientific rhetoric as anything else. It is vital for women -- including, of course, fifteen-year-old women -- to understand the mechanics of HIV transmission and the risks they run in having unprotected sex. It is also vital for women to understand the mechanics of pregnancy. But the figuring of women as defenseless, contaminable victims in sex is also bad for their health. It is also the reason that Dibbell's well-meaning concern for the "real" woman behind legba may be more worrisome than Mr. Bungle's virtual brutality. Concern for susceptible young girls may have more to do with why even a smart slick Kourier like Y.T. gets "helpless" (stupid) in the heat of the moment than with what she calls "passion".

But Y.T. puts a spin on all this. After the fact of the hot and heavy scene with Raven, it turns out what she'd forgotten wasn't what you thought it was:

She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fucking.

It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.

It was her dentata.

And if that wasn't good enough, it turns out that the dentata is not what you thought it was, either:

Which means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle slipped impreceptiby into the engorged frontal vein of his penis, automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his bloodstream.

Raven's been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. (383)

The penetrable, contaminable woman has penetrated the killer whale-like anti-hero, rendering him defenseless.

The flipping of gender roles at this moment is only one of Y.T.'s tricks. As I said, she enters the novel in drag. And if not Asherah in the flesh, she does much to infect the me of Enki, and the novel's world. Her disruption of the social code -- her risk-taking in the Kourier trade despite her gender -- occurs in racial terms as well. She's white, and some understand her name as "Whitey". But she repudiates racial dichotomies as well. Y.T. stands for Yours Truly. Me. And in this way, she even manages to infect the narrative voice, which calls itself by her name every time it mentions her. Y.T. might even be read as the omniscient narrator in drag -- or vice versa. If Hiro Protagonist conforms to all our assumptions about a hero protagonist's masculinity, Y.T. gets into that more subtle notion of omniscience, of universality, which doesn't call itself male, but may be a more virulent strain of sexist assumptions.

The first poststructuralist maneuver, of course, is to question the dichotomy between literal and figural language. Snow Crash refuses to isolate the Metaverse as metaphor, as a hypothetical world opposed to a real one, and as I have already argued, there may be a very salutary effect of taking seriously the metaphors which circulate around AIDS. Questioning the dichotomizing principle might make us see the insidiousness of group identity as it serves to make some feel "safe" -- and unimplicated. The global pandemic marks the trail of infection, of the most intimate kind of contact between different people of different nations, even if epidemiology, as well as xenophobic and misguided U.S. immigration policy, would rather ignore it.

The danger of current internal U.S. epidemiological trends is that as HIV increasingly and disproportionately affects communities of color, the "identities" of people in relation to HIV risk will appear increasingly fixed. The acknowledgment of the prevalence of HIV in a given community is extremely complicated -- both necessary and dangerous. But that acknowledgment is not only dangerous to the community who makes it, risking discrimination and even violence by voicing the problem. It is also dangerous to those outside the community, who may have a false sense of security. People like Y.T. who pay no mind to the "boundaries" of racial and cultural communities when they choose whom they will love aren't the ones who create these dangerous misconceptions. They are the ones who prove the boundaries deceptive.

There is a particularly painful irony in the final dichotomy which AIDS appears to pose itself: HIV-positive/negative. This seems to be a division which allows all the other divisive oppositions to proliferate. 8Individuals find themselves on opposite sides of a latex barrier. Latex is all well and good. I'm a fan of latex. But the illusion that it creates separate identities is the most virulent aspect of HIV. It allows for all kinds of other insidious dichotomization to take place. Women of all races clearly need to take their sexuality into their own hands, which means one should never go out without latex -- or without a dentata. That's the really significant form of defense: the subversion of the thesis of one's own "helplessness." 9 Cyborgs can get AIDS, particularly when they start believing that nice white girls can't.

Notes

1.  It should be noted that while Dibbell writes of Bungle's source with a masculine pronoun, the "real" Bungle is the only significant character in this story that Dibbell failed to speak with in "person." For all we know, Bungle may have been the cyber-manifestation of a woman.

2.  See the brochure for "ImagiNation," one such on-line service. From the name of this service, one can already see how the internet messes with other forms of identity, including national. But that's another story.

3.  The bibliography here is extensive, but for specific reference to the figuring of women in relation to AIDS and the immune system, see Treichler.

4.  This is not to imply that pregnancy cannot be a specter to a man as well. A male friend recently recounted to me a nightmare, in which a pregnant friend of ours was cheerfully stabbing an already bloodied syringe into the arm of her boyfriend. My friend tried to intervene, and she laughingly said, "Don't worry, it doesn't hurt at all. See?" With this, she turned to my friend and began to jab him in the top of the head. The figural connection between pregnancy and infection may have preceded AIDS, but now it has certainly come, as it were, to a head.

5.  Emily Martin has characterized the "common picture" of reproductive function in scientific literature as: "egg as damsel in distressÉsperm as heroic warrior to the rescue." 1991: 491.

6.  See Paula Treichler, 27. Treichler notes that the account of the vagina "shot through with cracks and lesions, punctures and sores" is just the flip side of an equally dangerous depiction -- "ruggedÉimpervious to sordid pathogens." It's sort of like the old virgin/whore story located in a single vagina!

7.  See Martin, 1994: 55-59. Martin also notes the race and class coding of the term "housekeepers of the immune system."

8.  Here, I slip myself into my own omniscient narrative, like a needle under the skin. As the long-time partner of an HIV-positive person, I, Y.T., found myself struggling with the epidemiologists' identification of me as both negative and "Whitey." We were a "nonconcordant" couple, and there wasn't an epidemiological questionnaire that we filled out that didn't resolidify our other (racial and ethnic) differences.

9.  Sometimes, of course, things get out of hand. Sexual violence (as well as other forms of manipulation, including economic) exists, which is why, unfortunately, we can't get rid of the rhetoric of hand-to-hand combat.


Works Cited

Dibbell, Julian. 1994. "A Rape in Cyberspace; Or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture , Ed. Mark Dery. Durham: Duke University Press.
ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/MOO/papers/VillageVoice.txt

Fraiberg ,Allison. 1991. "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing    the Body in the Postmodern." Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of    Interdisciplinary Criticism. V.1, No. 3 (May).
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.591/contents.591.html

Haraway, Donna. 1985. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Socialist Review 80: 65-107.

Kurtzman, Joel. 1988. "Curing a Computer Virus." New York Times , Nov. 13, 1988: F-1, cited in  Raymond Gozzi, Jr., "The Computer Virus as Metaphor." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 47(2): 177-80.

Martin, Emily. 1991. "The Egg and Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles." Signs 16(3): 485-501. ‹‹‹‹‹. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture -- From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS . Boston: Beacon Press.

Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash . New York: Bantam Books.

Treichler, Paula. 1992. "Beyond Cosmo : AIDS, Identity and Inscriptions of Gender." Camera Obscura 28: 21-76.

Barbara Browning (browning@is.nyu.edu) teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at N.Y.U.  Her book, Samba: Resistance in Motion, was published by Indiana University Press in 1995. She is currently completing a book on Western configurations of African diasporic performance practices as contagion.