Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature interrogates an array of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories from Mexico whose themes engage directly with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce – all published during and influenced by the country’s neoliberal era. This book argues that television, computers, and smartphones and the literary narratives that treat them all correspond to separate-yet-overlapping scopic regimes within the country today. Amidst the shifts occurring in the country’s field of vision during this period, the authors of these cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives imagine how these devices contribute to producing specular subjects—or subjects who are constituted in large measure by their use and interaction with visual technologies. In doing so, they repeatedly recur to the posthuman figure of the cyborg in order to articulate these changes; Stephen C. Tobin therefore contends that the literary cyborg becomes a discursive site for working through the problematics of sight in Mexico during the globalized era. In all, these “specular fictions” represent an exceptional tendency within literary expression—especially within the cyberpunk genre—that grapples with themes and issues regarding the nature of vision being increasingly mediated by technology.
Author(s): Stephen C. Tobin
Series: Studies In Global Science Fiction
Edition: 1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 207
Tags: Latin American/Caribbean Literature; Fiction Literature; Latin American Culture; Visual Culture; Latin American History
Acknowledgments
Praise for Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Entering the Screen
Visceral Scopic Regimes
Specular Fictions: Towards a Definition
Genre and Gender: Mexican Cyborgs as Sites of Discourse on Sight
Post-/cyberpunk
10 Crucial Years: Comparing Screens in Mexican Science Fiction
Visibilization in Mexico During Globalization
Transformations in the Media Industry
Chapter Trajectory and Overview
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Where is my Eye? Gendered Cyborgs, the Male Gaze, and Lack in La primera calle de la soledad [The First Street of Solitude] and “Esferas de visión” [“Spheres of Vision”]
Porcayo: An Emblem of Mexican Cyberpunk
La primera calle de la soledad
Ocular Prosthesis: Confusion, Ambivalence, and Sight as Site of Struggle
The Right to Look: Male Visuality versus Female Countervisuality
Female Characters in PCS: From the Male Gaze to the Spectacularization of Femininity
Other Female Characters: Woman-as-Abject and Warrior/Neoliberal Masculinities
“Esferas de visión” [“Spheres of Vision”]
“Where is my eye?” Female Cyborg’s Deficient Eye as Wound, Trauma, and Neurosis
Male Retro-Cyborgs with Phall-ocular Prosthesis versus Female Cyborgs Who Lack
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Televisual Subjectivities: Mediatic Ultraviolence and Disappearing Bodies in “Ruido gris” [“Gray Noise”] and Punto cero [Point Zero] by Pepe Rojo
Pepe Rojo: A Cyberpunk Seer
“Ruido gris”: Ocular Cyborgs and Reality TV
Television under NAFTA: The Rise of Ratings, Competition, and Mediatic Violence
Electricity Injections and the Vanishing Body
Punto cero: Televisual Imaginaries and Split Subjects
(Mis)identifications, Corporeal Dis-locations, and Dehiscence: The Subject Splits Open
Detemporalization and Commodification
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Fake Presidents and Fake News: Holograms and Virtual Lenses in Eve Gil’s Virtus and Guillermo Lavín’s “Él piensa que algo no encaja” [“He Thinks Something is Off”]
Virtus: From Virtualization to Blackout
The Society of the Spectacle in Virtus
President as Apparition Rather than as Politician
Political Marketing and the Actual Secretaries of State
The Spectacle of the Social
“Él piensa que algo no encaja” [He Thinks Something Is Off]
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Specular Fictions in the Age of Embodied Internet
Works Cited
Index
