Queer Cyborgs in South African Speculative Fiction: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes and The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden

Abstract

This article explores the image of the queer cyborg in two works of speculative fiction about South Africa, Lauren Beukes's Moxyland (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) and Nicky Drayden's The Prey of Gods (London: Harper Voyager, 2017). These queer cyborg characters inhabit imagined futures where the interface between human and technology is both a conduit for self-expression and a threat to their freedoms and lives. I use Donna Haraway's essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991) as a queer theory to argue that the characters in these novels can use the human–machine interface to experience themselves more fully and to queer their environments. The characters become queer cyborgs who blur the boundaries between human/animal, human/machine, and physical/non-physical. However, the interface with technology in these novels also reinscribes the long history of violence and oppression suffered by queer people in South Africa and globally. I argue that the queer cyborg, although conceived in idealistic terms by some post-Harawayan theorists, represents the position of queer people as outsiders in South Africa, and that these novels offer important critical perspectives on what the future might hold for queer people as everyday life becomes more cyborgian. Technologies that might provide sites for social change and for redefining restrictive identity categories are simultaneously sites that bring new forms of manipulation, oppression, and control for the queer cyborg, and this figure can thus speak to present-day cyborgian experiences of queer people in South Africa.

Keywords:

• South African literature
• Lauren Beukes
• Nicky Drayden
• cyborg
• Donna Haraway
• speculative fiction
• queer theory
• queer literature
• science fiction