Feminist Memorializations in Marge Piercy and Rafael Carter - He, She and It and The Fortunate Fall

Sep 11, 2026

Uploaded by Mason

Marge Piercy’s He, She and It and Rafael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall envision a Global North future shaped by corporatism, patriarchal militarism, and technological stratification. Through close attention to memory and memorialization, both novels expose how fictional states mobilize advanced technologies to seize power over citizens, especially women. By contrasting brutally authoritarian state memory with social and personal memory practices, the analysis highlights how feminist resistance can be recuperated against state violence. The study also situates each work within cyberpunk’s revival and post-Cold War technoculture.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Globalization, Anti-Genderist Sentiments, and Memory after the Cold War

Cyberpunk revival and feminist futures-to-come

State seizure of memory and memorialization

Resistance beyond the Global North

Feminist Memorializations in Marge Piercy and Rafael Carter Feminist Memorializations in Marge Piercy and Rafael Carter Tram Nguyen, CUNY Hostos Community College, USA Abstract Marge Piercy’s He, She and It and Rafael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall render the future of the Global North as dominated by corporatism, patriarchal militarism, and technological stratification. Piercy and Carter investigate the problematicsof memory and memorialization to imagine possibilities for ethical subjectivities for worlds transformed by advanced technology and AI. These novels accuse their fictional states of mobilizing advanced technologies to seize power over their citizens. Emphasizing the pernicious consequences of gendered violence committed by state institutions, Piercy and Carter show in their novels that while state memory practices and memorializations are brutally authoritarian, social and personal memory practices generate a means of recuperating feminist resistance against state violence. Feminist Memorializations in Marge Piercy and Rafael Carter Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1991) and Rafael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996) fuse cyberpunk tropes with feminist concerns to contest state brutality and constraints on women’s citizenship. Piercy and Carter highlight the threats to women’s autonomy and citizenship under patriarchal militarism and technocultural dominance at the end of the twentieth century. For the editors of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2021), cyberpunk is “everywhere” and fertile ground for “interrogating the future of identity from feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Afrofuturist perspectives, as well as broader cultural interrogations of (sur)veillance and cultural activism” (McFarlane, Murphy, and Schmeink 1, 4) . While it emerged as a subset of science-fiction, dominated by masculinist (and Orientalist) motifs, cyberpunk literature is experiencing a revival in the twenty-first century in response to increasing consolidation of power among high-tech and digital technocrats.1 According to Fredric Jameson, as an exemplary sign of postmodernism, cyberpunk “is fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself” (38) . Corporate practices of obfuscation, single-minded pursuit of profit, privacy infringement, and data collection validate nervousness about current and future manifestations of technocracy. In examining two novels published several years shy of the start of this new century, I want to highlight the first-wave zenith of cyberpunk’s literary visions of feminist futures-to-come. I propose that Piercy and Carter’s novels herald utopian possibilities for women’s full participation in the world, as women, as cyborgs, as fluid in their identities and desires. Piercyand Carter complicate this possibility of expansive subjective freedoms for women, however, with depictions of corporate, militaristic, technocratic domination that constrain women’s personhood. Both novels portray futuristic states as patrilineal, militaristic, and corporatist, reflecting the political economies of the Global North in the 1990s. They also situate sites of resistance outside the Global North, in the Middle East (Piercy) or Africa (Carter) . In Piercy’s novel, the Jewish“free-town” (3, 7) Tikva is a geographical mirror of Israel and exists as a counterpoint to the North American, patrilineal, and corporatist Yakamura-Stichen (Y-S) . With much of the novel unfolding in this utopian city state, Piercy fleshes out the ways in which her protagonists, Shira Shipman, a former Y-S coder, and Yod, a futuristic bio-engineered cybernetic being, learn to challenge the oppressive ideologies and 1 Lisa Yaszek’s “Feminist Cyberpunk” identifies four phases of feminist cyberpunk: ProtoCyberpunk, from 1818-1979; First-Wave Feminist Cyberpunk Second, 1980-1990; Second-Wave Feminist Cyberpunk, 1990-2005; and the Third-Wave, from 2005-present. Yasek provides an incisive covera

FAQs

How do He, She and It and The Fortunate Fall connect memory to political power?

Both novels show that state institutions mobilize advanced technologies to seize control over memory and memorialization, including silencing personal and communicative memories and imposing sanctioned histories.

What role does cyberpunk play in these feminist works?

Piercy and Carter fuse cyberpunk tropes with feminist concerns to contest state brutality and constraints on women’s citizenship, framing threats to autonomy as tied to patriarchal militarism and technocultural dominance.

Where does resistance emerge in these novels, according to the text?

Resistance develops through persistent attempts to uncover alternative ways to remember and commemorate ethical subjectivities, and through memory practices that extend beyond authoritarian state models.

Sep 11, 2026

Uploaded by Mason