The Souls of Cyberfolk Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory Thomas Foster Table of Contents		$25.00 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3046-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3406-4 $75.00 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3045-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3405-7
Considers the construction of race, gender, and sexuality in virtual reality. In The Souls of Cyberfolk, Thomas Foster traces the transformation of cyberpunk from a literary movement into a multimedia cultural phenomenon. He examines how cyberpunk defined a framework for thinking about the cultural implications of new technologies—a framework flexible enough to incorporate issues of gender, queer sexualities, and ethnic and racial differences as well as developments in nationalist models of citizenship and global economic flows. Beginning with William Gibson’s paradigmatic text Neuromancer, and continuing through the works of Maureen McHugh, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, and Ken MacLeod, Foster measures cyberpunk’s reach into social and philosophical movements (the Extropy Institute), commercial art (Hajime Sorayama’s gynoids or sexy robot illustrations), comic books (Deathlok), film (Robocop), and music video (from Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk album). The central challenge that cyberpunk poses for cultural critics, Foster argues, is to understand what happens when the technological denaturalization of physical embodiment becomes the norm. "A bold and powerful book, extending our understanding of how imaginative writing can respond to the urgencies of the present and think of the possibilities of the future." —Modern Language Quarterly “This book is a must-read for any scholar working on cybernarratives, whether they be text, film, comics, or till artworks.” —Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter “Thomas Foster’s The Souls of Cyberfolk, well versed in the scholarship that has preceded it, is a welcome and original contribution to the field. This important book outlines the current research on the posthuman and earlier work on embodiment, technology, and cyberpunk, and introduces race as an unduly neglected in posthuman scholarship. It makes clear that our discussions of the posthuman are only just beginning. Furthermore, the work has been updated and expanded, incorporating more recent scholarship. Even readers already familiar with Foster’s work will find new ideas and a more nuanced treatment of previous ones. The Souls of CyberFolk is an extremely good and important book. It is theoretically astute, cogently argued, and impressive in the range of theoretical and contextual sources that it brings to bear on its argument, beginning the discussion of race and cyberpunk/posthuman imagery, an important lacuna in existing scholarship. The Souls of Cyberfolk is an essential contribution to posthumanist scholarship and should be read by anyone interested in the field.” —Science Fiction Studies Thomas Foster is associate professor of English and director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University. 392 pages | 19 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2005 Electronic Mediations Series, volume 13 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Cyberpunk's Posthuman Afterlife 1. The Legacies of Cyberpunk Fiction: New Cultural Formations and the Emergence of the Posthuman 2. Meat Puppets or Robopaths: The Question of(Dis)Embodiment in Neuromancer 3. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Posthuman Narratives and the Construction of Desire 4. Trapped by the Body: Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance 5. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Performativity, Virtual Embodiment, and Racial Histories 6. Replaying the L.A. Riots: Cyborg Narratives and National Traumas 7. Franchise Nationalisms: Globalization, Consumer Culture, and New Ethnicities Conclusion: The Antinomies of Posthuman Thought Notes Works Cited Index