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Ghost girls and sponsorbabes: dystopianperformances of white femininity in LaurenBeukes's MoxylandJennifer M. Schmidtaa University of JohannesburgPublished online: 09 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Jennifer M. Schmidt (2014) Ghost girls and sponsorbabes: dystopian performances ofwhite femininity in Lauren Beukes's Moxyland, Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 19:1,109-118, DOI: 10.1080/18125441.2014.906237

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ARTICLES109 Unisa Press pp 109118scrutiny2 19(1) 2014issues in english studies in southern africaISSN: Print 1812-5441/Online 1753-5409DOI: 10.1080/18125441.2014.906237

Ghost girls and sponsorbabes: dystopian performances of white femininity in Lauren

Beukess Moxyland

JENNIFER M. SCHMIDTUniversity of Johannesburg

Jennifer.Schmidt@nwu.ac.za

Like anyone else, there are days I feel beautiful and days I dont, and when I dont, I do something about it. (Cheryl Tiegs)

White women are constructed as the apotheosis of desirability, all that a man could want, yet nothing that can be had, nor anything that a woman can be. But, as I have argued, white representation in general has this everything-and-nothing quality. (Richard Dyer 1993:161)

Abstract

The overdetermined visibility of white South African womens bodies and their positioning, historically, as the object of visual pleasure and a sexy reinforcer of white privilege suggests that looking relations are powerfully linked with how post-apartheid whiteness is gendered. Given the visibility particular to South African whiteness, I argue that the young white female subjects body becomes a site that mediates hegemonic whiteness and interrogates white privilege through her now-precarious role as a star for the gaze of the dominant culture. One text that problematizes how young white womens bodies are looked at in the post-apartheid cultural landscape is Lauren Beukess recent novel, Moxyland. Set in the Cape Town of 2018 and featuring a corporate apartheid government that disciplines with an effortlessly casual chic, Beukess speculative text highlights how the hegemonic power of whiteness maintains itself through a rigorous self-normalised body practices and gendered commodification, with a heightened emphasis on visuality. Kendra Adams is a photographer who has recently agreed to be implanted with nanotechnology that will keep her youthful skin smooth and improved in exchange for branding herself permanently as a hipster advertisement for the sports drink, Ghost. Through Kendras attempts to document the process of becoming a Ghost Girl juxtaposed with the multi-media manipulation of her image, Beukes deftly limns how the micropolitics of female embodiment is linked with the global flow of whiteness.

Key words: whiteness, Lauren Beukes, post-apartheid literature, the gaze, speculative fiction, dystopia, femininity and embodiment

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A girl wielding a camera. Pale, enervated from the chemical cocktail with which she has just been injected, she surreptitiously takes a pic-ture of the company logo beginning to glow underneath her skin. This is, after all, her sec-ond chance. Since it first burst onto the liter-ary scene in 2008, Lauren Beukess specula-tive novel, Moxyland, has been a commercial success and made history as the first South African novel to have an accompanying mu-sic soundtrack and toy. Set in the Cape Town of 2018, it presents a slick, techno-savvy, and seemingly post-racial world run by a corpo-rate government as seen through the eyes of four twenty-somethings. These protagonists include: Toby, a trust fund baby turned rogue blogger; Tendeka, an increasingly radical anti-corporate urban activist; Lerato, an elite programmer who plots defecting from her corporate employers; and Kendra, a photog-raphy school dropout who has branded her-self for a nanotechnology marketing firm as a sponsorbaby for the soft drink, Ghost1, in exchange for keeping her skin looking young and obtaining greater exposure in the art world. Interwoven in their stylized and highly self-reflexive first person accounts is a critique of the competing and contradictory discourses that structure post-apartheid subjectivities. This subtext also probes the cult of celebrity and the self-normalising practices of youth-ful, hip, and disciplined bodies. These young people do not need to be reminded of what is the correct aesthetic that operates as the norm and by which they will be judged; with-out being told, they also know that subjectiv-ity is now intensely grounded in a continuous process of the refining of bodies and looks in pursuit of the elusive ideal. Such disciplin-ing is both physical and discursive, entailing the myriad of internalised routines and regi-mens that re-inscribe and valorise the slender, taut and toned (implicitly white) body as the right look and that, crucially, encode self-management. While Beukess text does not explicitly signpost race2 (the only hierarchy is corporate/civilian), it does present a nexus

of cultural residues specific to whiteness that reveals its strategic plasticity. A close reading of Kendras negotiations with the micropoli-tics of embodiment upon embarking on life as a Ghost girl reveals that the star power of a cool, effortlessly casual3 white femininity sustains the hegemonic power of whiteness.

The lacunae in Kendras narration deftly show that the gendering of post-apartheid white-ness relies on the right look, both in terms of embodiment and discourse. Celean Jacob-son (2006), in her analysis of the recent phe-nomenon where significant numbers of young post-apartheid white women writers are be-ing published4 and what this success might suggest about shifts in the critical discourse, observes that forerunners of this wave of womens writing, continue to produce evoca-tive stories that follow trends in local fiction of being less about grand politics and more personal. I would argue that this focus on the personal, on embodiment, is far from depo-liticized. Rather, it interrogates the epistemic violence inherent in the gazing at and disci-plining of bodies, and particularly in the case of white bodies enables a shift in emphasis from the effects of otherness to the biopolitics at work in normalization. Unlike the Euro-American context, whiteness for white South Africans has been always already visible, as Melissa Steyn (2005: 122) notes:

The particular historical and political configuration in South Africa has meant that whites have never experienced their whiteness and the advantages it affords them as invisible one of the key components in the way whiteness is theorized in the metropolitan heart of whiteness. Throughout the apartheid era white South Africans knew they were racialized, and some of their earliest memories recount differences in how they were positioned relative to others. What was taken for granted, however, was the naturalness of being thus privileged. (original emphasis)

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Such self-reflexivity about being visible is also gender-overlaid. If, historically, the bod-ies of white women have been constructed as the apotheosis of desirability (Dyer 1993: 161), their cultural capital has been reinforced through the strict and strategic management of those bodies as spectacle, one vital in main-taining a link to global white hegemony in a post-apartheid South Africa. In Moxyland, a visual hyper-literacy permeates the cultural landscape, and all are well-schooled in how to see and evaluate bodies, and this is a more acute scrutiny despite, or perhaps because of, technological advances that enable the ma-nipulation of appearance and even identity. Virtual worlds such as Pluslife5 and Moxyl-and, the childrens videogame of the novels title, present the illusion of being freed from bodily determination while remaining co-ercive. When the earnest activist, Tendeka, meets up in Pluslife with shadowy fellow ac-tivist and mentor, *skyward, whose avatar is purposefully unconventional, *skyward wryly explains the strategy behind his appearance, highlighting that a subjectivity constructed in (even) a virtual reality is not free of self-nor-malization, and, as he observes, even in game space everyone wants to be skinny and beauti-ful (Beukes 2008: 31, emphasis added). Their exchange and others in the text underscore that it is not enough to have the right body, the normative criteria for which it has become in-creasingly restrictive, one is also required to have the correct, detached look; moreover, such a disciplining gaze extends to real and imagined communities. In this context, Kend-ras choice of an old school non-digital cam-era as her artistic medium, which is also an object of complex bodily self-identification, becomes particularly striking. In unravelling the significance of Kendras relationship to her camera as she negotiates becoming a Ghost girl, I want to make use of Elizabeth Groszs (1999: 268) observation that the body image extends far beyond the subjects skin, for it in-cludes clothing, the surrounding environment, tools and implements, and even vehicles. To

contend with her role as a designated spectacle her branding with the soft drink Ghost reify-ing the position of the white female subject Kendra attempts to manage her objectification and reverse the flow of power relations of the gaze by taking pictures with her camera, with-out which she feels naked (Beukes 2008: 2). As a counter-hegemonic gesture, this briefly disrupts and surfaces the essentializing forces of normative white femininity and how her subjectivity is circumscribed by a discourse of bodily self-management. Furthermore, it un-derscores how the bodies of sexy, young white women become hotly contested spaces and their strategic displaying is particularly crucial when the valences of whiteness are shifting.

For Kendra, the photographic process individ-uates her, and also enables her to construct an anti-essentialist aesthetic counterpoint to the implicit chic criteria dictating her embodiment as Ghost girl. She is interested in imperfection and does not want the smooth, seamlessly re-producible image of the digital format. This focus on imperfection enables a kind of reflec-tiveness that has disruptive potential, echoing Roland Barthess observation about photogra-phy that Ultimately, Photography is subver-sive not when it frightens, repels, or even stig-matizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks (1981: 38, original emphasis). A gloss of some of Kendras descriptions of her camera reveals its role as an extension of herself and how it works as a tool to offer a limited critique of her subjectivity and the experience of objectifica-tion: upon being injected with the nanotech, she wishes she could embed a camera inside [her] body (Beukes 2008: 6); when she drinks her first Ghost following the injection and meets a subtly jealous Toby, who asks what it feels like to have the nanotech, she describes it in photographic terms: Im just improved. Its like, everythings running better, like Ive had a tune-up, you know? The world seems sharper. Or fiercer. As if someones pulled the focus. Like in photography, hyperrealism (20). The advantageous anti-ageing tweak

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she gets from the nanotech does not change the fact that her Leica Zion camera remains her everyday filter on the world (48). In addition to trying to decontextualise space (19), she wields the camera as a weapon, which, in the process, exposes racialized gender norms. One photo in her exhibit captures a drag queens localized performance of gender through a close-up of the caked make-up on her skin, which, in its indeterminacy, destabilizes the gender boundary (50). Another photo features Stacy, a thirty-eight year old editor, and one of the women with whom Kendras boyfriend/manager, Jonathan, is sleeping and highlights the masquerade of white femininity through a sharp focus on her vulnerable knee caught in a Lolita-esque pose (52). When Kendra first meets Toby and he kisses her unexpectedly, she responds by later catching him unawares and takes his picture. He observes shes com-pletely composed now, as if its the camera rather than the nanotech inside that smooths out the edges (21). But her power in captur-ing Tobys image is mediated by the fact that he has a blog on the internet and surreptitious-ly records and displays video via his R30 000 BabyStrange jacket this technology enables him to have a more wider range of surveillance and greater control over the dissemination of the Ghost girl image. Significantly, Kendra be-comes increasingly aware that, as a Ghost girl, her visibility will increase exponentially as the marketing plan is to go international as quick-ly as possible, beginning with New Korea, a name suggestively hinting at both the histori-cal fetishization of pale, white skin under colo-nization, and the present-day phenomenon of south-east Asia as the popular destination for young, cosmospolitan native (read: white) English speakers, including South Africans, with the right accent for teaching English. Through this aggressive marketing campaign, Ghost thus can be linked to other nodes in the global flow of white identity. As Vron Ware and Les Back (2002: 185) note, whiteness needs to be understood as an interconnected global system, having different inflections and

implications depending on where and when it has been produced. I read the use of Kendras body in this international marketing campaign as a sexy legitimation of both normative definitions of beauty she is referred to as model-esque and an attempt at securing a hegemonic whiteness through plugging into the slipstream of global capitalism.

At this point, a brief synopsis of Kendras narrative thread in the novel will help to con-textualize her bifurcated position of being a photographer who is also simultaneously a designated erotic spectacle as a white fe-male subject and a Sponsorbabe: the reader first learns that the impetus for her agreeing to be injected with the nanotech was that she recently lost her father to cancer the anti-ageing, free radical-fighting properties of the nanotech are therefore psychologically compensatory because of their medical ben-efits specifically in terms of cancer, as well as extremely attractive in an aesthetic sense through their giving one a competitive edge in the beauty industrial complex and aiding in the preservation of the right look. With the nanotech, one becomes permanently addicted to Ghost; there is the additional side effect of experiencing a cocaine-like rush every time one drinks the soft drink,6 and Kendra consid-ers this a fair trade. Shortly after becoming a sponsorbaby Inatec Biologica corpora-tions7 term for their branded hipster young artists she launches her first major exhibi-tion of retro photo prints, which is vandalized by Tendeka and other anti-corporate guerrilla activists (with Lerato an indirect accomplice), who have targeted the exploitative genetically modified art of one her colleagues. Thereafter, Kendra learns that her sponsorbaby status is not a secret, and, in fact, is the direct result of collusion between her manager/part-time boy-friend and the nanotech firm to which she has branded herself. Simultaneous with this rev-elation, Kendras now-damaged photos sky-rocket in value at having been broadcast on Tobys blog. While the rejuvenating properties

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of the nanotech continue to work wonderfully cuts quickly heal, her pale skin looks radi-ant there are other, hidden side effects. One in particular that becomes increasingly unset-tling to Kendra is the pattern of experiencing unconscious connections with Aitos, the ge-netically engineered vicious police dogs that patrol the streets and have a similar nanotech implant. After the drama at the exhibition, she has become closer to Toby, who has been playing activist with Tendeka for fun and fol-lowing her progress as a Ghost girl. One eve-ning on the way to rendezvous with each other while coming from very different locales he is interrupted in the midst of some playful anti-corporate terrorism, she is leaving a club with some friends each is sprayed with the fatal M7N1virus that the police use as a form of crowd control. After finding each other, they grow increasingly disturbed at the implica-tions of what has just happened. First, they are alarmed by their exposure to the virus and second, at the realization that their cell phones were simultaneously defused by the cops, and, therefore, they are now off the grid in a lit-eral disconnection from other civilians by being locked out of the underground and all other public spaces. With a limited time before the virus melts their internal organs, they hook up in a Ghost and cocaine-induced frenzy. Af-ter arguing, they then angrily go their separate ways, each searching for a way to get back on the grid without having to check in at a police station and then receiving the antidote. Still in a haze, Kendra returns to Inatec Biologica to have the nanotech checked (and indicates she would like it removed). Her final scene in the text hints that she is taken care of, like one of the forcibly retired Aitos.8

With a tone that is an admixture of studied ca-sualness and the lyrical, the novel opens with Kendra en route to being injected with the magic nanotech that will keep her young and a 24/7 sexy advertisement. The text makes it clear that she is aware of the commodification of her body as a sponsorbaby, a member of

a group who are, she observes, just as much proprietary technology (Beukes 2008: 2). With her cyber-punk feminism firmly in place, Kendra is highly attuned to the manipulation of bodies, though she presents a tongue-in-cheek critique of the coercive mechanisms that determine how she is positioned within the power structure of her environment. This critical awareness aligns her narrative with what Donna Haraway outlines as a feature of cyborg writing (a category of identity that fits Kendra, with her nanotechnologys fusion of the cellular with the cybernetic): Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the ba-sis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other (2010: 2215). Given the dystopian setting of the novel, Kendras cyborg identity has a more limited autonomy than what Haraway envisions, fleshing out the mechanisms of control enabled by tech-nology and offering a powerful portrait of domination.9 Likewise, she recognizes that she is infantilized10 by the network of men in her life who are involved with her transforma-tion into a sponsorbaby for Ghost, or in her words, a Ghost girl: Andile, the Vukani me-dia executive who recruited her, is patronizing and always refers to her as babes; Jonathan, her manager, a former fashion photographer11 and currently a not-quite boyfriend, has liaised with Andile to help Kendra become a star pho-tographer, and once she is branded, he dresses her up, but will not touch her; and, finally, Toby, whose coveting of her slender body is equally matched with his desire for her sexy nanotech and following some messy, drug-induced sex, gets what he wants on both counts. On the way to having the nanotech im-planted, Kendra discreetly, and illegally, given Inatecs concern with proprietary technology, photographs the plush corporate surroundings. Significantly, this corporate landscape is a pa-limpsest of historically white spaces and re-flects the difficulty of negotiating a discourse that still contains the architecture of white insularity via the perks of being a corpo-

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rate: private beaches (Clifton without the crowds), separate carriages on the underway, seats unmarked by the pocked craters of ciga-rette burns, no blaring adboards, no gangsters checking you out (Heyns 2008). Kendras description of the injection of the nanotechnol-ogy is also in keeping with her performance of an effortlessly casual, hipster chic. The fissures in this faade become more prominent as the narrative continues, and ultimately reveal that her inability to model the correct attitude to ac-company the right look ensures her failure as a sponsorbaby. Her commentary here also exposes the gendered power relations between the corporation and its sponsorbabies when she compares the literalized penetration of the proprietary technology with a disappoint-ing first sexual experience (Beukes 2008: 6). Inatec Biologica has its origins as a cosmetic company, and Kendra responds to this and to the ways in which she was highly scrutinized during the sponsorbaby interview process by imagining different, ironized versions of the scene when Dr. Precious injects her with the nanotech. She envisions the following:

I imagine her in a white coat and face-mask in a sleek lab that is all stainless steel and ergonomic curves, like in the toothpaste commercials. Or behind a cosmetics counter, spritzing wafts of perfume and handing out 50 g samples of the topshelf biotech creams (one per customer, please). This isnt so different after all. Its just that the average nano in your average anti-ageing moisturiser acts only on the subdermal level. Mine, on the other hand, is going all the way. (Beukes 2008: 5)

These images foreground the ways in which this now-literalized technology of beauty hyperbolically represents the logical con-clusion of the discourse of self-mastery and control that mark the micropolitics of gen-dered embodiment for postmodern bodies. As Susan Bordo (2002: 245246) observes, we are increasingly fed on fantasies of rear-ranging, transforming, and correcting, limit-

less improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and, indeed, the very materiality of the body. In place of that materi-ality, we now have cultural plastic. Kendras description thus displays simultaneously an awareness of the seductive power of this fan-tasy of continuous self-improvement and its liminality. This liminality will be examined in greater detail through a close reading of Ken-dras Self Portrait photograph later in my argument.

Kendra is fascinated by the nanotechs effect on her skin and this immediately becomes a new photography project: a time-lapse series of images to capture the change her skin un-dergoes upon becoming a Ghost girl. With obsessive attention to detail, she notes each bruise, each shift in colour as the signature green glow of Ghost radiates from her pale skin: Four thousand one hundred and twenty photographs over the time it took to develop, like film. Played back in timelapse the bruise blossoms and bursts, resolving like a Ror-schach into the logo (Beukes 2008: 48). Her narrative reveals that it is white skin that is the implicitly designated ideal surface to interpellate the Ghost glow, suggesting a lit-eral and metaphorical haunting of the nor-mative power of whiteness. Kendra does not refer to herself as white but references to her pale skin, green eyes, and visible bruises that sharply contrast with her own pigmenta-tion support this reading, as does her use of the multivalenced term, Ghost girl. As a discursive category, whiteness is not mono-lithic, complete, or uniform but contextually bound and fluid. Two moments in the narrative when she self-consciously refers to herself as a Ghost girl stand out as representing oppo-site points in the emotional spectrum, ranging from elation to melancholy, of responses to the vulnerability involved in shifting definitions for gendered post-apartheid whiteness. The first moment occurs a week after the injection and Kendra playfully engages with various as-

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sociations with ghost and muses on her own voluntary experience of commodification:

Im a demo model for their demographic. An angel of aspiration. A guinea pig for an appropriate alliterature beginning with g. Ghost, I guess. Only once removed on the food chain from the kids who sell space on their chamo, adblips playing out on the plastivinyl of tees and jackets like walking projectaboards, only with more risks inherent. And my skin does look amazing, like its been buffed and scrubbed and moisturised within an inch of its life, all velvaglow and radiant, even though the only cosmetic in the apartment is Jonathans aftershave. Its been almost six days now with no side-effects, or only good ones, apart from the first few miserable days when the flu and achiness hit. But then maybe that was self-induced. Maybe all of this is. (Beukes 2008: 49)

Later, expressing a more vulnerable side while thinking of Jonathan, she uses the same term to indicate a sense of lack on a personal level; strikingly, this does not extend to a systemic critique of the social forces underlying the ex-pectations of the heterosexual romance plot, though her words invite the reader to reflect upon it:12 Because I am afraid. That hes right. That without him, I am a nonentity. Girl in lim-bo. Ghost girl (151). She remains caught in the tension between the two discursive spaces as a Ghost girl, performing the haunted and haunting normative power of whiteness. She thus becomes catachrestically a girl disap-pearing from this discursive space at the very moment she exposes its heterogeneity. While the concluding scene in Kendras narrative im-plies that she meets the same fate as the eutha-nized damaged Aito police dogs that share her nanotech, the hegemonic power of white-ness, while vulnerable, is far from fading. Her fate suggests that a more rigid aesthetic model, while damaging, is what is needed to survive.

Kendra twice mentions a particular photo-graph, revealingly titled Self Portrait, and this image works as a crystallization of both the limits of her contrapuntal manoeuvres as

a photographer and the gendering of a post-apartheid whiteness that relies on the right look, as I have argued. On the surface, the photograph appears to have been overex-posed: it is entirely black and seems devoid of any images whatsoever. (One is reminded of Barthess description of a photograph as Whatever it grants a vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see (1981: 6)). Her brief and more self-disclosing second description of the photo reveals that this is a much more complicated text. Tellingly, her revelation to the reader occurs in response to overhearing someone at the photo exhibition comment on the photo: Like shes the only angst child to ever embrace a distorted body image (Beukes 2008: 134). She mentally responds:

Im more amused than insulted. Im about to point out that under the black of Self Portrait is a photograph of a photograph, clutched in my fingers, captured in the mirror with a reflected flash of light. That its all meant to be damaged. But then I realise I dont have to. I dont have to make my motives transparent. (Beukes 2008: 134)

Here she refuses to reproduce an image of the white female body or even a unified sub-jectivity. In doing so, she not only highlights the implicit normativity of this image, but, in her playful substitution of a non-image that is a continued deferral of that body as spec-tacle, she shatters the idea that the idealized, correct slender, detached look embodied in the white female subjects starring role also offer(s) fantasies of safety, self-containment, acceptance, immunity from pain and hurt (Bordo 2002: xxi). This destabilizing evoca-tion of whiteness simultaneously captures its fluidity the mirrored white fingers caught in the light and that such shifting is a means by which whiteness retains hegemony as a discursive category. That this performance is literally covered over under the blackness of the photo and can only be apprehended through the knowledge of Kendra as an indi-

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vidual, rather than as a Sponsorbabe for Ghost, indicates both the desire for and difficulty of en-visioning alternative forms of post-apart-heid whiteness while acknowledging the his-torical imbrication of oppressive gaze struc-tures and white hegemony.

As a haunted Ghost girl in Moxylands dys-topia, Kendras narrative reveals that, while in crisis, whiteness still retains its hegemonic power through the rigorous management of the spectacle of the white female subject as she performs a cool, detached and strategi-cally limited intersubjective look. Beukes does not present a world that is either discursively beyond race, nor does she uncritically repro-duce essentialist definitions of whiteness, but, rather, one in which the very plasticity of whiteness as a hegemon is inscribed and re-alized in the pursuit of the right look. The self-disciplined bodies of white women and their stricter engagement in the micropoli-tics of embodiment thus become essential, in both senses, to securing whiteness under the threat of destabilization in a post-transitional South Africa. Kendras increasing discomfort as a Sponsorbabe, leading up to her eventual rejection of this cultural plastic normalizing aesthetic, marks the shifts in the gendering of a South African whiteness insofar as whiteness is now primarily secured through gender as a display, underscoring the staying star power of white women as sexy distraction. In her sub-sequent failure to fully embody the role and the price paid for unsettling it, Kendra also highlights how Sponsorbabes reflect both the continued aspirational desire for whiteness as well as a rigid reinforcement of its discursive boundary. White womens bodies still remain the right surface to mark the latest instantia-tion of hegemonic whiteness and at a time of perceived vulnerability must perform all the more insistently an effortlessly casual de-meanour, with or without the nanotech.

Notes

1 The link between Ghost and the popular drink Spook en Diesel, with its association with a white trash identity, suggests that having cool, white, implicitly middle-class, urban artists represent Ghost is strategically important in its marketing campaign. Such bodies simultaneously secure cultural capital while making the product appear sexy. The gendered implication of an attractive female photographer as a Ghost Girl also gestures at the illusion of control over the ageing process, ironically through a self-selected addiction.

2 Significantly, the international cover for the novel is in black and white, and presents the four protagonists as faceless. Instead of faces, there is an encircled x superimposed on each face, similar to the computer error message that one finds when an image on the internet cannot be downloaded. Their faceless tableaux suggests both the postmodern malleability of subjectivity and its obverse: the accoutrement each figure carries (camera, jacket and cell phone) clearly indicates the identity of that protagonist, and, furthermore, the silhouettes still reveal raced markers of identity, such as dreadlocks.

3 With the greater scrutinization of the body as well as narrower definition of what constitutes the right look, this is a performance of casualness that covers over the work involved in intensely pursuing the aesthetic ideal.

4 Some of the writers and works mentioned by Jacobson include Diane Awerbucks Gardening at midnight, Lisa Fugards Skinners drift, Rachel Zadoks Gem squash tokoloshe, Rosie Fiores This years black, as well as works by Henrietta Rose-Innes and Alexandra Fuller.

5 Pluslife is a virtual world similar to Second Life. Tendeka describes Avalon, where he has a home, as follows: With 59.3 million registered users, its one of the worlds favourite virtual escapes, which makes it easier to blend in unnoticed. Despite the Euro-traditional name, Avalon is Asia-centric, so the game word is six to eight hours ahead and more than half the population doesnt speak English, which suits me perfectly. Whats the point of escaping to Plus if the world is too close to the one you just left? (Beukes 2008: 31).

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6 Donna Haraways description of the heightened sensory link that accompanies a cyborg identity, an identity that problematizes the boundaries between human and machine, is particularly useful in reading Kendras psychological responses to drinking Ghost. Haraway observes: Insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (e.g. biology) and in daily practice (e.g. the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrid, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices (2010: 2217). I would suggest that the emotional intensity that accompanies Kendras experiences of being implanted with the nanotechnology, another form of hybridization, emphasizes the tension between the circumscribed autonomy that she experiences as a Sponsorbabe and the promise of a liberating, heightened sensory experience that is the selling point for Ghost.

7 The nexus of corporations involved in the marketing of Ghost is striking: Which doesnt mean that the contract didnt include a host of clauses indemnifying Ghost, their parent company Prima-Sabine FoodSolutions International, Vukani [Media], Inatec Biologica and all their respective agencies and employees against any unforeseen side-effects (Beukes 2008: 5). Significantly, the Sponsorbabes are not allowed to meet or socialize with one another until the official launch of the soft drink.

8 Dr. Precious makes the link clear between the instrumentalist use of Kendra and the dogs. When asked if they retire dog, whose nanotech implants have supposedly worn out, she underscores the role of commodification: Its our intellectual property. Its very closely guarded. They put the dogs down (Beukes 2008: 233). That Kendra is put down like one of the Aito dogs

with which she shares a nanotech connection requires a closer reading. (The overdetermined signifier of the dogs in the post-apartheid, post-Disgrace literary landscape is beyond the scope of this paper, but certainly does raise the question of the abnegation of white privilege by white South Africans.)

9 Haraway presents the cyborg as offering both imaginative potential and critique of postmodern circumstances: From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point (2010: 2196). The fact that the reader toggles between four narratives, and that Kendras cyborg narrative is only one of them, also replicates the shifting of perspective that Haraway suggests.

10 One striking example is Andiles consistent use of baby talk with Kendra. After she has been examined to see if the nanotech is working correctly, he tells her: Well, now that weve gotten the icky check-up stuff out of the way, we need five more minutes of your very precious time for the doccie. Making history, babes (Beukes 2008: 98).

11 Kendra describes his habituated execution of the male gaze as something he is aware of, but rationalizes as the product of the fashion industry rather than culture or ingrained patriarchal behaviour: Jonathan gives me the full-body up-down like he does to the models in castings. Its an old habit, he tells me, from the job. As in, dont take everything so personally, Kendra (Beukes 2008: 50).

12 This indirect critique of the heterosexual romance plot (and its links with capitalism, emphasized by Jonathans sub rosa involvement in Kendras

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becoming a Sponsorbabe) still marks gender as a culturally constructed phenomenon. Beukess feminist critique shares earlier feminist science fictions distrust of essentialism, but differs in the absence of a female community. In contrast, landmark texts of feminist science fiction of the 1970s explored utopian possibilities of women-only communities. Some examples include The female man (1975) by Joanna Russ and Motherlines (1978) by Suzy McKee Charnas. Perhaps Kendras struggle to articulate directly a feminist critique in a dystopian future that appears fatigued by identity politics can be read then as gesturing towards the particularly stormy history of feminism in a South African context.

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Haraway, Donna. 2010. A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Leitch, Vincent (ed.). Norton anthology of criticism and theory. New York: Norton, 2187-2220.

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Biography

Jennifer Schmidt is currently a lecturer at North-West University in Mafikeng and canbe reached at Jennifer.Schmidt@nwu.ac.za. She has published on contemporary South African white writing and the representation of subjec-tivity. Her present research concentrates on the nexus of gender, genre and sexuality in post-millennial South African fiction. She was pre-viously a post-doctoral fellow at the Univer-sity of Johannesburg, under whose auspices this article was prepared.

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