| Sumario: | This paper explores the ideologies implicit in the representation of posthuman bodies in William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction. It first outlines a taxonomy of posthuman bodies. It then isolates four major forms of the posthuman in Gibson: the laboring body, the repressed body, the disappearing body and the marked body. The laboring body is mostly gendered, and tends to project the work of the body. However, cyberpunk sees bodies as subservient to the capitalist cause, and hence, represent them as laboring bodies, whether male or female. The repressed body is one where the 'original' tends to be subsumed under technology, and is placed under the control of devices and software. The disappearing body is one whose 'original' form is altered through replacements and additions. Finally, the marked body links the human form to consumer culture with acquisitions of prosthesis and the desirable appearances. After this taxonomy, the essay moves on to discuss the politics of posthuman bodies in three realms: families, aging and citizenship. It explores the implications of 'cyborg families', where traditional notions of a family are overturned through technological alterations. Cyberpunk does not offer anything other than expensive technology as a solution to aging--as this essay notes in its discussion of the ideologies of aging in the posthuman age. Finally, it addresses the question of citizenship, and the changing ideas of the individual and community in the age of cyborgs, as they alter the landscape of politics itself. It thus, calls into question several of the hagiographic assumptions made about the advent of the new technologies.
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