Compare and contrast the representation of masculinity in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman and Phillip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? To what extent do these texts bear out or contest the postmodernist proposition that gender is an “ideologically constructed category rather than a fixed biological certainty”?
Both texts bear out this proposition to some extent through somewhat similar use of the heavily loaded names of the characters, and the different ways in which the characters refer to one another. In doing so they illustrate just how powerful naming is as an ideological tool, particularly for resisting fixed biological understandings of sex and gender. Each book makes a metaphorical use of artifice in that each blends the real with the artificial in such a fashion that this blending can itself be seen as a metaphor for the deconstruction of gender implied by the title proposition and manifested in the texts. Indeed, both texts exemplify the ideas of Donna Haraway, though since both were written before her relevant work it might be more historically accurate to say that she was influenced by reading them, “The boundary between science-fiction and social reality is an optical illusion - the boundary between the physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.” (Haraway, 2001, p46) This uncertainty about the physical, or more precisely particular interpretations of the physical, underpins both novels and in particular the highly pertinent sex scenes.
The names of the novels and their protagonists provide sound evidence of support for the title proposition. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? plays androids and electric sheep, i.e. artificial life forms, off against dreams, or the natural illusions of conscious life. Both are illusory, but both really exist, at least in the world of the novel itself. This is almost a textbook example of Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement, associating the usual with the strange to produce, in Brecht’s words, “A representation which allows us to recognise its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” (Suvin, 2005, p189) The names of the central characters are clearly marked by their gender: the males are almost ubiquitously referred to by surnames - Deckard, Isidore, Polokov/Kadalyi, Garland, Resch, Mercer - whereas the females are usually referred to by forenames - Rachael, Luba Luft, Pris, Irmgard, Iran. By using such an obviously[1] contrasting method of referring to the dozen or so main characters Dick illustrates how easy it is for language (and hence ideology) to construct gender difference, regardless of biology. Not only does the book illustrate this, it also subverts the difference once it has been established. “Deckard” is an exceptionally masculine name, connoting the image of an erect penis. This seems absolutely intentional as it fits in with the protagonist’s initial state as an overtly masculine, impassive, “murderer hired by the cops” (Dick, 2004, p4). To emphasise this, by the end of the novel both the author (e.g. p197) and Iran (e.g. p205) are referring to him as Rick, connoting a greater familiarity and empathy both on the part of the protagonist and for the reader. By breaking down Rick’s ideologically constructed role as a hyper-masculine destroyer of the only things in the world with less empathy than him, the book suggests two things. Firstly, just how contingent Rick’s identity is, specifically with relation to his gender, on language as a means of identification and secondly just how quickly and easily language can shift and become a means of subversion.
Puig uses a similar strategy in Kiss of the Spider Woman, in that the title combines “Kiss”, a symbol of physical intimacy, with the alien “Spider Woman”. The same use of a novum to contrast the intimate and familiar illustrates that this title intends to have much the same effect as Androids, but the juxtaposition is more stark. Indeed, “Spider Woman” itself is an effective use of the novum/A-effect in that it contains an estranging contrast between the normal, woman, and the alien, spider, that sets up the reader to treat the familiar(ity) with scepticism. Again the names of the two principal characters, both male, are significant. Molina is the (feminine) homosexual’s surname, whereas Valentin is the (masculine) Marxist’s forename. This is in direct contrast to how the same technique is used in Androids, but I think Puig is doing roughly the same thing in a more subtle fashion. Because there is no author’s narrative voice referring to him as Molina, it’s even clearer than in Androids that the name is an ideological construct, used by others - the formality of using a surname perhaps signifying the marginalizing of homosexuality that preoccupies many of the later footnotes to the text. It’s also significant to note that the first voice we read is Molina’s, that despite the potential estrangement of using a surname to refer to him, we are made familiar with him immediately. This is, I believe, a subtle way to inspire sympathy in the reader for Molina, and hence for the struggles homosexuals and such cultures[2] face on a regular basis. Valentin, on the other hand, is predominantly a listener in the opening chapter, as Molina describes the first movie to him, so despite the instant familiarity of knowing him by his forename, we aren’t offered the same immediate reason to take interest in him or sympathise with his cause. This is, in part, because Valentin is a bit like Deckard in the opening sections, very masculine and rather closed and emotionless, even snapping at Molina, “Look, remember what I told you, no erotic descriptions. This isn’t the place for it.” (Puig, 1991, p4). While Valentin is conventionally heterosexual, even talking about his girlfriend on the outside at various points (e.g. p28-9 and much of chapter 7), because he’s in a prison with nothing but other men, his sexuality is repressed, and subsequently subverted, more than Molina’s. This demonstrates how masculinity-as-dominating-heterosexuality, a relatively common stereotype both in and outside of literature, is very much ideological, dependent on context and not a fixed certainty, biological or otherwise.
Both novels contain sex, but neither contains normal heterosexual sex in the typical mid-late 20th century understanding of that term. In Androids Deckard doesn’t sleep with his wife but does sleep with Rachael, but neither he nor the android are doing it for particularly sexual reasons, as noted by Warrick, “Rick hopes his lovemaking will lead her to be willing to help him destroy her twin, Pris. She promises. But after the act, her promise turns out to have been a mere manoeuvre to get him into bed to vitiate his will to kill.” (Warrick, 2005, p201) To emphasise just how barren and perfunctory the sex is, Rachael even dwells briefly on what it would be like to be pregnant, something that she can never experience. This is a clear demonstration of how gender is not a “fixed biological category” because Rachael is the female in the couple yet the biological purpose of sex is procreation, something that can never result from this union. Rather, I believe that Dick is intimating that because of their relative roles in this semi-fictional society, sex and gender are mere tools of ideology, constructed by it and used to maintain it. That there are two clear conflicting ideologies at play - Deckard’s role as killer of androids, Rachael’s role as protector of herself and other androids - suggests that even the assertion that sex and gender are mere tools of ideology should be subject to scepticism.
Likewise the sex in Kiss, which is homosexual anal sex and so has very little, if anything, to do with procreation. Twice Molina and Valentin sleep together, twice it is Valentin who penetrates Molina, rather than the other way round. This might indicate that it is Molina who is adopting the female role in this sex, thus normalising it to an extent within the typical, biologically based understanding of sex and gender. And in all fairness, Molina spends most of the novel referring to himself as female: - “When it comes to him I can’t talk about myself as a man,” (Puig, 1991, p60) “What do you take me for? An even dumber broad than I am?” (p89) “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female.” (p203) I think that it’s clear, however, that Molina doesn’t mean biologically female, but is rather using this form of self-identification as a resistance to the ideologies that marginalize him, and his homosexual friends. This ironic use of “female” and “broad” and so on is made obvious late on the in the novel when Molina has been released and is being monitored by the police. The observation reports repeatedly mention that in phone conversations Molina and his friends refer to each other using female names, such as “Teresa, China, Perla, Caracola, Pepita, Carla, Tina.” (p264) This is noted again before the police report eventually realises, albeit via “pompous officialese” (Dunne, 2005, p208), that “It did not seem to pertain to any code, but rather a running joke between the two.” (Puig, 1991, p267) This is a careful rhetorical construction, because it is a running joke, but isn’t merely a running joke. It is a form of linguistic resistance to precisely the sort of language, and ideology, that is used in the police reports, yet it is only via the voice of those reports that this is finally confirmed. Prior to that it could be seen as little more than an affectation on Molina’s part, but when it is habitual behaviour of his homosexual friend, told through the filter of the voice of the police report, the political dimension is made apparent. So, the signifier “female” doesn’t mean female in the conventional biological sense, but is rather used as a form of political resistance. We can see a similar irony in the issue of penetrative sex, in that just because Molina is the one who is penetrated doesn’t make him female, because for one he is actually more dominating, seductively speaking, than Valentin, and for another it is of course entirely possible for a female to penetrate a male during sex[3], just not in quite the same way as a male might penetrate a female. Thus, even the physical signifiers of sex are used, in both novels, to provide alternatives to the biological conception of sex, and to deconstruct typical notions of how gender is associated with sex, but it is only in combination with the rhetorical (i.e. the non-physical) that this becomes clear.
What both texts demonstrate is that a key part of any ideology is its system of reference, the names used to refer to various things and the systematic relations between them. Both of the novels' titles combine the familiar with the alien, the other, to produce an estrangement that begins their deconstructions of the notion of gender as a fixed certainty, whether biological or ideological. Indeed, the radical scepticism in [i]Androids[/i], where the distinctions between the physical and non-physical, the artificial and the natural, the real and illusory, indicates that even the notion of gender being an ideologically constructed category is itself an ideological notion. When Rick states, finally, "Everything is true," (Dick, 2004, p195) he is expressing a profound scepticism for the above distinctions, which underpin and feed into the male-female/masculine-feminine distinctions of gender difference. The sex in the two novels expands on this from written or verbal signifiers to the physical language of action, again resisting a biological reading (of sex) but without reducing it to a mere ideological construct. Likewise, Puig's polyphonic deconstruction of physical, biological understandings of gender doesn't necessarily endorse the notion that sex and gender are ideologically constructed, or at least that they are that and only that. Molina resists the official system of reference that calls him a male homosexual, by referring to himself and his friends as female, even using female names. Thus the book shows how ideological categories constructed via language are subject to the slips and shifts of that language. [i]Androids[/i] does a similar thing with the protagonist by easily shifting from "Deckard" to "Rick". This not only emphasises the change in the character, it also shows how easily language can shift, and that the things dependent on language can shift consequentially.
Footnotes
[1] Obvious on reflection, that is, since I missed the relevance of this when I first read the book
[2] And perhaps femininity as a whole, irrespective of whether it is manifested in males or females
[3] And for a male to penetrate a male, and a female to penetrate a female
Bibliography
Dick, Phillip K., 2004, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, London, Gollancz
Dunne, Michael, Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, in Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds), 2005, A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, Oxon, Routledge
Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, in Sim, Stuart, 2001, Lyotard and the Inhuman, Cambridge, Icon Books
Puig, Manuel, 1991, Kiss of the Spider Woman, London, Vintage
Suvan, Darko, Cognition and Estrangement, in Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds), 2005, A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, Oxon, Routledge
Warwick, Patricia S., Mechanical Mirrors, the Double and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds), 2005, A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, Oxon, Routledge
