SOURCE: “‘The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic’: Posthuman Narratives and the Construction of Desire,” in Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means, edited by Robert Newman, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 276-301.

In the following essay, Foster examines the implications of disembodied sexuality in cyberpunk culture.

You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic.

—Barbara Kruger

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis leaves off.

—Sherry Turkle, The Second Self (309)

During the Post-Body Age, we're going to get songs like: She shut me down / wiped me clean / made me blanker than a banker's screen / But that's alright / There's no end in sight / I'm programmed well against that risk / with 47 copies of myself on disk.

—Otter, in the independent zine Dropout (22)

Recent popular culture often seems to agree with Jean Baudrillard that “the year 2000 has already happened” and therefore it is “not necessary to write science fiction” any longer, since we now...