1. de Lauretis, T ‘Signs of Wdonder’ in de Lauretis, T, Huyssen, A and Woodward, K (eds) The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (Madison, Wis: Coda P, 1980) pp 160–170.Google Scholar

2. Thomas Foster explains the development of cyberpunk: ‘The cyberpunk movement emerged in the late 1980s as a new formal synthesis of a number of more or less familiar science fictional tropes: direct interfaces between human nervous systems and computer networks: the related metaphor of cyberface as a means of translating electronically stored information into a form that could be experienced phenomenologically and manipulated by human agents jacked into the network: artificial intelligence, including digital simulations of human personalities that could be downloaded for computer storage: surgical and genetic technologies for bodily modification; the balkanization of the nation-state and its replacement by multinational corporations; and the fragmentation of the public sphere into a variety of subcultures. Cyberpunk distinguishes itself by the way it gave narrative form to what novelist and cyberpunk polemicist Bruce Sterling calls a “posthuman” condition.’ Foster, T ‘Meat Puppets or Robopaths'? Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment’ in Wolmark, J (ed) Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) p 208 at pp 209–210Google Scholar (references omitted).

3. Springer, C Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (London: Athlone Press, 1996) p 11 Google Scholar.

4. Ibid at 34.

5. A Balsamo ‘Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism’ in Wolmark, above n 2, p 145 at 150.

6. Above n 2, p 146.

7. N Nixon ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied’ in Wolmark, above n 2, p 191 at p 194.

8. Balsamo, A Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, N Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996) p 134 Google Scholar.

9. This is the case notwithstanding Gilbert Adair's assertion that the film represents ‘something unheard-of in modern cinema: a wholly unconventional science-fiction adventure’. G Adair ‘Cronenberg Unplugged’ Independent on Sunday, 2 May 1999.

10. D Haraway ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ reprinted in L J Nicholson Feminism/Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990) p 190 at p 191.

11. Tomas, D ‘Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson's Cultural Model of Cyberspace’ in Benedikt, M Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991) p 31 at p 32Google Scholar.

12. Springer, above n 3, p 79.

13. It is interesting to note that the price on Geller's ‘head’ is $5m, approximating to the Rushdie ‘bounty’.

14. Springer, above n 3, p 61. At a more general level it should also be noted that there is a ‘tendency in popular culture to associate computer technology with sexuality, creating a contradictory discourse that simultaneously predicts the obsolescence of human beings and a future of heightened erotic fulfilment.’ Ibid at p 8.

15. Haraway, above n 10, p 223.

16. First published in Socialist Review, No 80, 1985.

17. Haraway, above n 10, p 218.

18. Shildrick, M Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics (London: Routledge, 1997) p 34 Google Scholar.

19. Butler, J Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) p 24.Google Scholar

20. Haraway, above n 10, p 190.

21. This is a point which can also be made in respect of popular science fiction as a larger genre. This is perhaps most notable with the most hyped and keenly awaited film of recent years; George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Writing of the original Star Wars trilogy, Philip French has observed ‘an adolescent mishmash of world religions, mythology and old movies, everything from Wagner and Tolkien to The Wizard of Oz and Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress’. For French, The Phantom Menace is worse. The film is layered with racial stereotyping which is Onentalist, anti-Semitic and - in its most sustained - anti-Afro-Caribbean/American. Whilst French fails to comment on this aspect, the film also exists without challenging gender stereotyping. In a film focusing on commerce, politics and war, the only female characters are the generally demure queen and her handmaids. The film is ‘all tricks and no magic, ingenuity without imagination’. P French ‘Don't watch this space’ Observer, 18 July 1999.

22. Indeed, Nicola Nixon asks: ‘Where then, we might ask ourselves, is revolutionary potential articulated in cyberpunk fiction - apart from in its writer's own self-promotion and in the introduction to their anthologies? Or is it articulated at all?’ (above n 7. p 210).

23. Springer, above n 3, p 11.

24. Baudrillard, J Simulations (trans Foss, P, Patton, P and Beitchman, P) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) p 4 Google Scholar.

25. J G Ballard ‘Introduction to the French Edition’ reprinted in J G Ballard Crash (New York: Vintage, 1985) p 6.

26. V Sobchack ‘Baudrillard's Obscenity’ (1991) 18 Science-Fiction Studies 327. Although the author rather curiously avoids refemng to Crash see D Lupton ‘Monsters in Metal Cocoons: “Road Rage” and Cyborg Bodies’ (1999) 5(1) Body and Society 57.

27. Springer, above n 3, p 113.

28. This is also seen to an extent - and perhaps more interestingly - in Star Wars: Episode 1 - the Phantom Menace. Here the liberated slave child who is seen as the future of the Force - the saviour of the universe - is ‘Born of a virgin, he's part Christ, part Dalai Lama, part Macaulay Culkin’. French, above n 21. Yet the child, Anakin Skywalker, will become Darth Vader.

29. Springer, above n 3, p 31.

30. Foster, above n 2, p 215.

31. The gendered nature of a post-Cartesian subjectivity is clearly explained by Margrit Shildrick: ‘One major point of the post-Cartesian notion of the universal, transcendent subject is that he is constituted in the radical separation of mind from body. The privileging of the so-called higher faculties of reason, intellect, spirit and so on over the material and mundane grounds a two-tier system in which women, tied as they ostensibly are to their bodies, and most particularly to their reproductive bodies, have been deemed largely incapable of autonomous rational thought. Quite simply, women are deemed to live their bodies in ways that men are not, and this constraint on transcendence is alone sufficient to disqualify them from full subjectivity.’ Shildrick, above n 18, pp 167–168.

32. Above n 18, p 9.

33. Haraway, above n 10, p 193.

34. Balsamo, above n 2, p 148.

35. Springer, above n 3, pp 102–103. This failure may be read within the general trend for popular cultural forms to replay/rework popular established mythologies. As Terese de Lauretis has written: ‘[T]hrough these technologies, the passions and dramas of popular mythologies -jealousy, revenge, violence, and indeed paternal love (now seeking to supplant maternal love) - continue to replay in the contemporary imagination, repackaged in the popular epic forms of our time, commercially successful films, television serials, and supermarket fiction. (Think of the film industry's standard practice of making famous novels and plays into films, and then making successful films into, precisely, remakes.)’: T de Lauretis ‘Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg's M Butterfly’ (1999) Signs 303 at 305. This last point is perhaps taken to its extreme with the 1998 Gus Van Sant remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. The film was a curious exercise in that it followed carefully Hitchcock's original detailed directions.

36. Haraway, above n10, p 196.

37. Shildrick, above n 18, p 15.

38. Grosz, E Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (London: Routledge, 1994) p 23 Google Scholar.

39. S Sheldon ‘ReConceiving Masculinity: Imagining Men's Reproductive Bodies in Law’ (1999) Journal of Law and Society 26, 129 at 129 and 139.

40. Ibid.

41. Naffine, N ‘The Body Bag’ in Naffine, N and Owens, R J Sexing the Subject of Law (Sydney: Law Book Company, 1997) p 79 at p 85.Google Scholar

42. Ibid, p 86.

43. Ibid, p 91. This can also be said of matrimonial law, see K O’ Donovan Family Law Matters (London: Pluto, 1993).

44. Ibid, pp 138–139.

45. Ibid, p 142.

46. de Lauretis, above n 35, at 313. This proposition can also be seen in terms of the utopian. Commenting on the fact that there is an increasing failure to believe in the future promised by modernity, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called for a return to the utopian: ‘What is to be done then? The only route, is seems to me, is utopian. By utopia I mean the exploration by imagination of new modes of human possibility and styles of will, and the confrontation by imagination of the necessity of whatever exists -just because it exists -on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for, and to which humanity is fully entitled. My version of utopia is thus relative in a double sense. On the one hand, it calls attention to what does not exist as being the integral, if silenced (counter)part of what does exist. On the other, utopia is always unequally utopian, in that its way of imagining the new is partly comprised of new combinations and scales of what exists, indeed, almost always mere obscure little details of what does exist. Utopia requires, therefore, a deep and comprehensive knowledge of reality as a way of preventing imagination's radicalism from clashing with its realism. On the borderline between inside and outside, utopia is as much possessed of Zeitgeist as of Weltschmerz.’ B de Sousa Santos Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (London: Routledge, 1995) pp 479–430.

47. There is a tension in suggesting this reading if we attempt to place this in the context of Cronenberg's earlier films. The idea of ‘threatening technology’ has clearly surfaced in films such as Scanners, Videodrome and, as already noted, Crash. Yet the analogising of this potential threat with the ‘threat’ from women's bodies/sexuality runs counter to the sensitivity to gender politics shown in such films as M. Butrefly. As Teresa de Lauretis has argued in respect of M. Burrefly: ‘As its title suggests, the film re-proposes a stereotyped image of femininity, made popular by the heroine of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly; but it does so in light of contemporary discourses on gender, sexuality, and racial-cultural difference from the vantage point of postcoloniality. In re-presenting it with another cast of characters, the film at once deconstructs and reappropriates the narrative of feminine love and honor as eternal and selfless devotion to her husband and young son, built around the exemplary figure of Butterfly. It deconstructs it by showing it to be a Western patriarchal construct and an orientalist fantasy based on hierarchies of gender, race, and colonial and political domination. It reappropriates it by showing the narrative's enduring power to affect and even shape individual lives precisely because it works in the cultural imaginary as a fantasy, as something deeply felt and experienced.’ de Lauretis, above n 35 at 308 (quotations omitted).

48. Springer, above n 3, p 56.

49. Another clear early example is James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935). It is interesting to try and work through the parallels in these films. In Whale's classic, Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelly at the beginning of the film and the demonic Bride at its close (itself an interesting duality, the demure and the monstrous). Is Jennifer Jason Leigh author (of eXistenZ), is she the monstrous (the pro-reality fundamentalist and ‘author’ of the game scenario that features eXistenZ), or indeed is she Elsa Lanchester and the ‘author’ of both?

50. Braidotti, R Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p 81.Google Scholar

51. This figure can be read within legal discourses: see eg M Thomson ‘Legislating for the Monstrous: Access to Reproductive Services and the Monstrous Feminine’ (1997) Social and Legal Studies 401. Also Cooper, D ‘Punishing Councils: Political Power, Solidarity and the Pursuit of Freedom’ in Millns, S and Whitty, N (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Public Law (London: Cavendish, 1999) p 245.Google Scholar

52. Springer, above n 3, p 71.

53. Springer, above n 3, p 50–51.

54. Walby, C Aids and the Body Politic (London: Routledge, 1996) p 13 Google Scholar.

55. Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (1953–74, 5:492) cited in de Lauretis, above n 35 at 306–307.

56. Balsamo, above n 2, p 149.

57. Ross, A Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991) p 145.Google Scholar

58. Springer, above n 3, p 7.

59. Haraway, above n 10, p 194.

60. Baudrillard, J Xerox and Infinity (trans Agitac) (Paris: Touchepas, 1988) p 7.Google Scholar

61. See N Nixon ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’ (1992) 57 Science-Fiction Studies 219.

62. Irigaray, L Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (London: Routledge, 1993) pp 37–44.Google Scholar

63. Ibid, particularly p 38.

64. Springer, above n 3, p 51.

65. Springer, above n 3, ch 4.

66. Shildrick, above n 18, p 9.

67. M Thomson ‘Employing the Body: The Reproductive Body and Employment Exclusion’ (1996) 5 Social and Legal Studies 243.

68. Examples can be seen with the only case to have been heard in the United Kingdom, Page v Freight Hire (Tank Huulage Co) Ltd (1981) IRLR 13, and the three cases to have reached the US Courts of Appeal: Wright v Olin 697 F 2d 1182, Hayes v Shelby Memorial Hospirul 726 F 2d 1543 (11 th Cir 1989); UA W v Johnson Controls Inc 886 F 2d 871.

69. See Thornson, above n 67; M E Becker ‘From Mullet- v Oregon to Fetal Vulnerability Policies’ (1986) 53 University of Chicago LR 1219; E Draper ‘Fetal Exclusion Policies and Gendered Constructions of Suitable Work’ (1993) 40 Social Problems 90.

70. UAW v Johnson Controls 59 USLW 4209 (1991).

71. 59 USLW 4209 at 4211.

72. In terms of the United States, see the policies involved in the following litigation: Benson v Environmental Protection and Aeration Sys, Inc No 79–2610 (W D Tenn, filed 5 September 1979); EEOC v General Morors Corp No 76–583-E (SD Ind, filed 22 September 1976); St Joe's Mineral Corp (WD Pa, filed 13 November 1975); and Oil, Gas and Atomic Workers v American Cyanamid Co 741 F 2d 444 (DC Cir 1984).

73. In terms of the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Standard of Exposure to Lead prohibits workplace exposure where blood lead levels may exceed 50 micrograms per 100 ml (22 CFR 1910.1025 (c)(1) and (k)1(I)(D)). It is interesting to note that in 1987 the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) advised that blood lead levels above 25 micrograms per 100 ml was an issue for public health concern. In 1993 NHMRC adopted a goal of 10 micrograms per 100ml in keeping with revised recommendations elsewhere. (National Health and Medical Research Council, Report of the 103rd Session, Hobart, June 1987 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1987), National Health and Medical Research Council, Lead in Australians. Summary statement of the 115th session of the NHMRC, 2 June 1993 (Canberra: NHMRC, 1993).)

74. Ibid.

75. C Assennato, R Molinini, C Paci et al ‘Sperm Count Suppression Without Endocrine Dysfunction in Lead-Exposed Men’ (1987) 42 Archive of Environmental Health 124.

76. Preamble to Occupational Safety and Health Standard, 43 Fed Reg (1975), 54, 388.

77. M L Lindbohn, M Sallmen, A Antilla, H Taskinen and K Hemrninski ‘Paternal Occupational Lead Exposure and Spontaneous Abortion’ (1991) 17 Scandinavian Journal of Work Environmental Health 95.

78. Affirmative Action Agency, ‘Submission to the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission on Discussion Paper on the Control and Safe Use of Lead at Work’ 30 August 1990, 4. (Copy on file with Worksafe Australia, Sydney and the author.)

79. See Thomson, M Reproducing Narrative: Gender, Reproduction and Law (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1998) pp 125–126.Google Scholar

80. Fletcher, A Reproductive Hazards at Work (Manchester: Equal Opportunities Commission, 1985) p 5.Google Scholar

81. See The Broken Hill Associated Smelters Ply Ltd v The Humun Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (1990) Australian and New Zealand Equal Opportunities Law and Practice 92–302.

82. C Winder and C Mason ‘Lead Standard Saga Continues’ (1994) 10(1) Journal of Occupational Health Safety - Australia and New Zealand 3 at 4.

83. Ibid.

84. Springer, above n 3, p 10.

85. de Lauretis, above n 35, p 307. Recognising the tie between female subjectivity and embodiment, there is a further relationship between cinema and the creation of (female) subjectivity that is worth briefly acknowledging: ‘We will want once more to note that assiduous, relentless impulse which claims the female body as the site of an analytic, mapping upon its landscape a poetics and an epistemology with all the perverse detail and sombre ceremony of fetishism. And may we not then begin to think of that body in its cinematic relations somewhat differently? Not as the mere object of a cinematic iconography of repression and desire - as catalogued by now extensive literature on dominant narrative in its major genres of melodrama, film noir, and so on -but rather as the fantasmic ground of cinema itself.’ Michelson, A ‘On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy’ in Michelson, A et al (eds) October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) p 432 at p 433.Google Scholar

86. Haraway, above n 10, p 223.

87. Ibid.