Cyborg Hierarchies: Ecological Philosophy and

Cyberculture in Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass.1

Jayne Glover

Abstract
This paper argues that Piercy, in her 1991 novel Body of Glass, uses
cybernetics and robotics in order to engage with concepts of hierarchy and
difference. In particular, debates about nature and culture, the natural and the
artificial, as elucidated by some ecological philosophers, may contribute to a
clearer understanding of Piercy‟s intentions in the novel. By asking where the
boundaries lie between human and machine, this paper argues that Piercy
points out the importance of freedom and respect in relationships, and rejects
a hierarchical structure of dominance and submission through her portrait of
the cyborg Yod‟s relationships with the human characters in the story.

Key Words
Cybernetics; Ecocriticism; Othering; Speculative Fiction; Cyberpunk

Marge Piercy‟s 1991 novel, He, She and It was published in the United
Kingdom as Body of Glass, a title perhaps more evocative of the fragility of
embodiment in a posthuman world than the original American title. What the
American title does achieve, however, is the sense of otherness expressed
through the word „it‟. „It‟, in this case, represents, among other things, one of
the main characters in this futuristic text: a cyborg named Yod.
So often philosophical and literary scholarship devotes itself to the
problem of Othering by focusing on the more common examples of the so-
called Other encountered in our daily lives, such as race, class or gender
„others‟. Ecological philosophers base their theories of Othering on the
instrumentalist behaviour of humans towards their environment - rejecting
the kind of dualism which sees the natural world as a mere instrument to be
used to benefit human society. Body of Glass deals directly with the question
of Othering, but rather than merely assess how Othering works in our current
society, it pushes the issue one step further and asks the question of how
societies which place the Self on a hierarchy of worth above the Other might
evolve in a world which is becoming increasingly dependent on information
technology. The relevance to us today can be seen in our increasing reliance
on technology: we communicate with friends and colleagues over email on a
daily basis and the growing number of users of Facebook or Twitter indicates
that our social interactions, our very „friends‟, depend more and more on our
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connectivity to the internet. Marge Piercy‟s novel takes a hard look at a

possible future for us, describing an imaginary late-twenty-first century
where our very survival depends on technologies such as these.
Body of Glass is what could perhaps best be called an ecological
dystopia. The very ability of humans to survive in Piercy‟s vision of the
future depends on their access to technology: following the irreparable
damage done to the environment, most animals, unable to survive the
increased UV radiation and life in nature, have become extinct. Human life is
only sustainable under artificial domes built over cities; those unable to
afford to live in such spaces survive underground in places like the murky
„Glop‟, existing in gangs scratching a living in old subway tunnels and eating
“vat food, made of algae and yeasts”.2
This is the typical setting for apocalyptic science fiction and
cyberpunk in particular - as the resonances with the seminal cyberpunk text,
William Gibson‟s 1984 novel Neuromancer, suggest.3 Furthermore, as a
cyberpunk-styled text, it is a way to explore the increasingly complicated
boundaries between humans and machines, in what Fukuyama has called a
„posthuman‟ world. Veronica Hollinger has called the novel an exploration of
“the technological ramifications of experience within late-capitalist, post-
industrial, media-saturated Western society”,4 and Piercy, as one of few
women writers dabbling in cyberpunk, uses the genre to explore binary
power-relationships.
The most important way in which the binaries between the human or
natural and artificial or technological are challenged within the scope of
cyberpunk is through the idea of bodily connection to technology. As is
traditional in cyberpunk, the „Net‟ in the world of Shira, the main character
of Body of Glass, is not the purely computer-based internet of our own age,
which was only just emerging at the time of Piercy‟s writing. It is a highly
sophisticated and complex interactive tool. Access is not only through
interfacing with a screen, but via full immersion in the virtual world of the
Net: each computer terminal is fitted with a male coupler which slots into a
socket in the temple of the user.5 The characters are able to access the Net
directly because, as Shira explains, “[o]ne of the components in the plug
embedded in her real body was a decoder that made her able to access
machine language, [and] translate it instantly into numbers and words.”6 The
human brain and the computer processor therefore become one tool,
communicating through binary code and allowing human subjects to project
their consciousnesses into the virtual world of the Net wholly, and without
the boundary of the computer screen or keyboard.7 In Piercy‟s novel, then,
direct bodily connectivity with the Net is “the standard way people
communicated, accepting visuals, code or voice”.8 In an invention perhaps
analogous to the Blog or Facebook profile page, the characters can only
access the Net through their own personal „Base‟, which is like a home-page,
 Jayne Glover 3
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but which is physically linked to each person‟s brain and personality.
Society has got to the stage whereby people cannot function without their
base - they cannot communicate, think, work or create without accessing
some kind of computer-based system.
What is significant about this direct, physical interaction with the
Net in the novel is the potential symbolism of plugging into the Net in
relation to the concept of Othering. The ability to access the Net directly,
without any limits or margins, becomes an important way through which
Piercy expresses an idea of personal freedom. The limitations of the physical
body are totally eradicated in full projection into the Net, including the limits
of our own synapses, logic and imagination. The human and the machine, in
this sense, become one: thus, cyberspace becomes a way in which Piercy
envisions a utopian dissolution of the Self/Other boundary.
Piercy does not leave the reader with this perhaps unrealistic reading
of how technology can become the perfect solution to the problem of
Othering. Rather, she undercuts this idea by pointing to the perennial
problem of scholarship in the field of Othering: she asks the reader to wonder
what other forms of Othering, or repression, can replace the removal of one
type of Othering. In Piercy‟s case, she takes this apparently utopian solution
to the problem and begins to ask questions about where the dissolution of
boundaries through technology could actually lead us.
Piercy does this in a number ways, but as space constrains what I
can deal with in this forum, I am going to focus on the character of the
cyborg Yod, who embodies the dissolution of Self/Other boundaries through
the fusion of that which is human and that which is artificial. 9 Body of Glass,
according to Piercy,10 is partly a response to Donna Haraway‟s “Cyborg
Feminism”, which argues for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”.11
Indeed, Haraway‟s philosophy would correlate with the utopian-styled
freedom given to characters like Shira when immersed into the Net, where
boundaries no longer exist between Self and Other. Piercy‟s characterisation
of Yod, however, allows us to question how the suspension of barriers can
perhaps lead to a different kind of Othering as he is neither human nor
unconscious machine.
Rather than being a robot, a pure machine programmed for certain
tasks and unable to change its own programming, Yod‟s maker, the scientist
Avram, explains that Yod is “a mix of biological and machine
components”.12 Not only that, but Yod‟s programming is much like that of
our human brains: it is “self-correcting, growing, [and as] dependent on
feedback as we are”.13 Yod is created to protect the free-town of Tikva from
the Multis interested in exploiting it, and is Avram‟s tenth attempt to create
such a cyborg. The earlier models were unsuccessful precisely because their
programming was not self-correcting - an innovation introduced by Shira‟s
grandmother Malkah. Malkah‟s “humanizing” coding is designed to make
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Avram‟s cyborg able to assess a given situation, rather than merely act as a
violent and uncontrollable robot, as Avram‟s previous cyborgs did. It is
Malkah‟s programming, therefore, that changes Yod from machine to man,
albeit an artificial man. Malkah, for instance, extends his “pleasure and pain
centers” as well as his “capacity to imagine”.14 As this capacity to imagine
suggests, Yod‟s needs are surprisingly human. He admits that he needs “to be
touched”, he can “see colour” and experiences “boredom” and “loneliness”.15
Even more surprisingly, he shows a remarkable capacity for subtle
disobedience, hiding aspects of his personality from Avram, lying to him and
breaking out of the laboratory in order to visit Shira without Avram finding
out.16
It is through the development of the relationship between Shira and
Yod that the reader comes to realise the depth and breadth of his character,
especially as Shira‟s initial scepticism regarding Yod‟s apparently human
characteristics mirrors that of the reader. The first time Shira sees Yod, she
thinks he is human, but despite this initial response, once she realises that he
is a cyborg, she instantly assumes that he is a mere machine without any
emotions. When she touches him without his permission, his reaction makes
“her feel as if she were being rude, but that was absurd. You did not ask
permission of a computer to log on; computers did not flinch when you
touched them”.17 She also initially rejects Avram‟s use of the pronoun „he‟ to
refer to Yod, arguing that Avram is anthropomorphizing Yod, and is
surprised when Yod, unbidden, leaps to his own defence, by claiming that he
is a man.18 Malkah warns Shira not to think of Yod as a machine, arguing that
he is “[n]ot a human person, but a person” nonetheless.19
Although Yod is a human-seeming cybernetic organism, he has the
same characteristics that are perceived to be uniquely ours as human beings,
forcing both Shira and the reader to reassess their understanding of what it
means to be human. Yod himself tells Shira,

I‟m conscious of my existence. I think, I plan, I feel, I react. I

consume nutrients and extract energy from them. I grow mentally, if
not physically, but does the inability to become obese make me less
alive? I feel the desire for companionship. If I can‟t reproduce, neither
can many humans.20

Like humans, Yod shows that it is his ability to form bonds which makes him
more than a mere robot.21 In this, Yod is similar to Frankenstein‟s monster,
who feels deeply and yearns for human contact - only becoming a violent and
abhorrent creature when rejected by those with whom he shares
consciousness. Even their moments of coming into being are similar. In
Shelley‟s novel, the monster explains to Frankenstein that a “strange
multiplicity of sensations seized me”.22 Similarly, Yod tells Shira: “The
 Jayne Glover 5
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moment I came to consciousness, in the lab, everything began rushing in. I
felt a sharp pain, terrible, searing. I cried out in terror”.23 Yod tells Shira that
this pain was fear, suggesting a highly emotional response. Significantly,
both Yod and the monster know that they are alive: it is their separation from
other living beings that causes them pain, and their relationships with others
that teaches them compassion.24
The rewriting of the Frankenstein story in Body of Glass is made
overt through the many textual references to the original tale,25 and critics
such as Jenny Wolmark26 and Debra Shaw27 have suggested that Yod, like
Frankenstein‟s monster, is a symbol of the Other in the context of a gender
debate - his marginalisation mimicking that of women. Yet, Piercy does more
than simply suggest that Yod, like Shelley‟s monster, can be read as a symbol
of hierarchical gender structures: she uses Yod‟s reading of Shelley‟s novel
to alert the reader to the basic problem of Body of Glass - that of what
happens if we maintain hierarchical divisions between the natural and the
artificial in a world in which cyborgs exist.
When Yod reads Frankenstein, he wants to “die”28 because he
thinks that, like Frankenstein‟s creation he is “just such a monster. Something
unnatural”.29 Shira responds to his agonising by arguing that humanity has
become more and more artificial - with heart, kidney and retinal transplants
and artificial teeth and limbs, as well as the jacks that enable interaction with
their computers. She points out that humans can no longer “go unaided into
what we haven‟t yet destroyed of „nature‟. ... We‟re all cyborgs, Yod. You‟re
just a purer form of what we‟re all tending toward”. 30
Shira‟s response to Yod is, I believe, the crux of the novel. In the
future Piercy imagines, the boundary between natural and artificial, between
human and machine, has become so blurred that it is very difficult to say that
a cyborg is not a person any more than it is possible to say that humans are
still part of nature. Frederic Jameson suggests that the “reincorporation of
organic material in the imagery of the cyborg … tends to transform the
organic into a machine far more than it organicizes machinery”.31 If this is
the case, where does the human become the machine, and the machine the
human? And more importantly, what are the rights and roles available to
cyborgs within society? Piercy‟s method of exploring these issues raises
some important points and suggests that the blurring of boundaries
symbolised by cyborgs, as Haraway would have it, is dangerous if it merely
creates a new category of being to be dominated or exploited.
Piercy looks at Yod from two angles in the novel: Yod as person and
Yod as slave. On one hand, she emphasises that the differences between Yod
and the human characters are more a matter of degree than they are of kind.
Shira‟s relationship with Yod is vital in this regard, as her slow-growing love
of Yod eventually becomes a complete romantic relationship whereby she
can think of Yod as able to take the place of her ex-husband, become as a
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father to her child,32 and can have a happy and fulfilled emotional and sexual
relationship with Yod as a person, albeit not a human person.33 Although she
wonders whether having intercourse with Yod is somehow disgusting
because he is artificially created, she reasons that “her own interior was
hardly aesthetically pleasing. Were biochips more offputting than
intestines?”34 She also points out to him that although he is not a mammal
like her,

[w]e are all made of the same molecules, the same set of compounds,
the same elements. You‟re using for a time some of earth‟s elements
and substances cooked from them. I‟m using others. The same copper
and iron and cobalt and hydrogen go round and round and round
through many bodies and many objects.35

Here Shira‟s words suggest an ultimate connection between everything -

organic and non-organic, natural and artificial. It is, in fact, this idea of
connection that ecophilosophers such as Freya Mathews and Val Plumwood
use as the basis for their rejection of dominance/submission cultures, 36 and
which has led Haraway to argue that, in the cyborg, “[n]ature and culture are
reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or
incorporation by the other.”37 Shira‟s acceptance of Yod‟s difference, and
refusal to impose a hierarchical structure on their relationship, becomes
symbolic of an ideal relationship, in which Othering becomes impossible.
Like the elimination of hierarchy suggested by the human-Net
interface, then, Yod and Shira‟s relationship initially implies that the
Self/Other binary can be eradicated. Yet Yod is not treated with the same
compassion and respect by everyone. Over and again the subject of Yod‟s
freedom is discussed, with those who can respect him as an individual pitted
against those who see him as an instrument, most notably his creator, Avram.
At the same time, the novel is careful not to argue simplistically that because
Yod is conscious he is therefore human. Malkah argues with Avram, saying
that while Yod is artificial, “he possesses his own motivations, his own goals.
He‟s not a … robot, who works because you turn him on”. 38 Nonetheless,
Avram persists in seeing Yod as a tool to protect Tikva‟s freedom from the
dominance of the Multis, as this is what he envisaged when creating Yod.
Yod himself admits that he calls Avram „father‟ because he wants “to
establish a bond”39 with his creator and controller. At the same time, pointing
out to Shira that he does not really consider Avram as a father:

My relationship with him is one of unequal power. ... He

manufactured me. He chose to make me exist - but not me as an
individual, not who I am, only some of what I can do.40
 Jayne Glover 7
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Indeed, Avram “controls a self-destruct mechanism” in Yod‟s body, which
Avram can signal at any time, no matter where Yod is.41 His statement, “I
can‟t run away, though I want to”,42 is a poignant recognition of Yod‟s
helplessness in the face of Avram‟s cold instrumentalism.
Ultimately, Yod‟s existence is untenable – Avram uses Yod to
destroy part of the Multi trying to take Tikva‟s freedom by programming Yod
to explode when he arrives at the Multi. Yod, powerless in every other way,
takes the only action he is free to take, that of rigging an explosive in
Avram‟s laboratory in turn, not only killing his creator by taking this action,
but destroying Avram‟s labs and records so that another cyborg cannot be
created to think and feel, yet remain a tool. Yod, in fact, had realised the
dichotomy of his existence: “I don‟t want to be a weapon. A weapon that‟s
conscious is a contradiction, because it develops attachments, ethics, desires.
It doesn‟t want to be a tool of destruction.”43 Yod might feel like a person, he
might desire to live his own life, but he has been created as Avram‟s
instrument and thus is a slave to Avram‟s programming, not his own wishes.
Shira, in her grief at Yod‟s loss, briefly considers rebuilding him, but finally
understands that even if she made a cyborg using her copies of Avram‟s
records, the cyborg would never be Yod: like Yod, it would be unable to live
the life it chose, remaining a mere tool designed to mend her broken heart.
Neil Spiller points out that Frankenstein “was arguably the
beginning of cyperpunk” as it “explored human hubris and the consequences
of humanity taking life into its own hands”.44 Although Spiller‟s argument
may not hold for all of cyberpunk, the cyberpunk-inspired Body of Glass
certainly raises the issue of what it means to create conscious life in an
artificial being. Malkah, despite being responsible for designing Yod, realises
that giving him human characteristics may have been a drastic mistake:45
while her programming is what makes Yod possible, it also means that he
yearns, as he exclaims, to be “free to live as I want and choose”. 46 The denial
of that opportunity in the novel means that the reader has to ask whether Yod
can indeed be seen as a symbol of the destruction of boundaries and
hierarchies.
Piercy‟s characterisation of Yod forces us to consider how Othering
takes place in a variety of ways, proposing that the categories of natural and
artificial should be reassessed in the light of where they fit into notions of
power. The „natural‟ world (the environment or world of non-human nature)
has long been approached instrumentally and has been seen as less than the
human, the realm perhaps of nurture, because it lacks an apparently higher
consciousness. By imagining a world in which there is no longer any real
nature left, in which the artificial has become commonplace, Piercy‟s novel
shows the emergence of a similar instrumentalism towards the artificial. Is it
therefore „human nature‟ to relate to the Other in an instrumentalist way? It is
no longer enough, Piercy argues, to reassess responses to difference in
8 Cyborg Hierarchies
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gender, race, class or species; the intermingling of natural and artificial in her
imaginary future calls into question how we, on the cusp of a world in which
these interactions are becoming increasingly likely, will use our technology.
While it is futuristic, a novel such as Body of Glass has the power to
make its readers speculate on their own responses to Others. Since Descartes,
the natural has been seen as inferior: artifice, culture, that which represents
the human, is as God to mere Nature. By twisting this idea so that the
artificial is seen as less than the natural - by which is suddenly meant the
human - Piercy makes us question our responses to both nature and to
technology. We can no longer take either for granted. While we may
celebrate the ease through which technology can apparently circumvent the
barriers to communication between ourselves and others, perhaps we should
ask, after reading this novel, whether we may be creating a Frankenstein‟s
monster that will lead, ironically, to even greater hierarchies and deeper
divisions between ourselves and those Other to us.

Notes
1
M Piercy, Body of Glass, Michael Joseph, London, 1991.
2
Piercy, p. 41.
3
W Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984, Gollancz, 1985.
4
V Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and
Postmodernism”, in Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader,
B Nicol (ed), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002, p. 447.
5
Piercy, p. 187.
6
Piercy, p. 259.
7
This technology is not simply science-fictional - Chris Hables Gray has
documented a visit to MIT in 1995 during which he met “grad students
working on wearable computers and sophisticated human-machine
interfaces”, allowing them to interact both “in cyberspace and Massachusetts
at the same time”. C Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age,
Routledge, New York and London, 2002, pp. 9-10.
8
Piercy, p. 53.
9
The sub-story of the novel is of the golem brought to life in Prague‟s Jewish
ghetto in 1600, which parallels the story of Yod, and reinforces many of the
questions Piercy asks about artificial life in the main plot of the novel.
10
Piercy, p. vii.
11
D Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
Free Association, London, 1991, p.150, original italics.
12
Piercy, p. 67.
 Jayne Glover 9
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13
Piercy, p. 357.
14
Piercy, p. 107.
15
Piercy, p. 172; p. 85; p. 110 and p.113 respectively.
16
Piercy, p, 186.
17
Piercy, p. 66.
18
Piercy, pp. 67-68.
19
Piercy, p. 73.
20
Piercy, p. 88.
21
Piercy, p. 334.
22
M Shelley, Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818, Oxford
University Press, 1995, p. 80.
23
Piercy, p. 112.
24
Yod‟s relationships with Malkah and Shira both give him the bonds that he
so desperately needs in order to become more „human‟. Frankenstein‟s
monster, however, while learning compassion from the De Lacy family, is
ultimately rejected by them. He pleads with Frankenstein to show him
kindness in a desperate bid to become more humanised, which makes
Frankenstein‟s rejection of him all the more distressing. Shelley, p. 78.
25
Avram‟s son, Gadi, calls himself the son of Frankenstein, for instance, and
Yod‟s chosen image for himself on the Net is of the monster from Boris
Karloff‟s film production of Frankenstein. Piercy pp. 139 and 155.
26
J Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and
Postmodernism, University of Iowa Press, Iowa, 1994, p. 132.
27
D Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance,
Palgrave, Houndmills, 2000, p. 163.
28
Piercy, p. 141.
29
Piercy, p. 141.
30
Piercy, pp. 141-142.
31
F Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions, Verso, London and New York, 2005, p. 64.
32
Piercy, p. 307.
33
Piercy, p. 185.
34
Piercy, p. 171.
35
Piercy, p. 175.
36
See F Mathews, The Ecological Self, Routledge, London, 1991, and V
Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London and
New York, 1993.
37
Haraway, p. 151.
38
Piercy, p. 269.
39
Piercy, p. 89.
40
Piercy, p. 113.
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41
Piercy, p. 311.
42
Piercy, p. 311.
43
Piercy, p. 388.
44
N Spiller, Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era, Phaidon,
London, 2002, p. 12.
45
Piercy, pp. 18 and 324.
46
Piercy, p. 269.
Bibliography

Gibson, W. Neuromancer. 1984. Gollancz, London, 1985.

Gray, C. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge, New
York and London, 2002.
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free
Association, London, 1991.
Hollinger, V. “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.”
Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader. B Nicol (ed).
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002, pp. 446-462.
Jameson, F. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions. Verso, London and New York, 2005.
Mathews, F. The Ecological Self Routledge, London, 1991.
Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, London and
New York, 1993.
Piercy, M. Body of Glass. Michael Joseph, London, 1991.
Shaw, D. Women, Science and Fiction: the Frankenstein Inheritance.
Palgrave, Houndmills, 2000.
Spiller, N. (ed). Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era.
Phaidon, London, 2002.
Wolmark, J. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and
Postmodernism. University of Iowa Press, Iowa, 1994.

Author Identification
Dr Jayne Glover is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of
English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in
the United Kingdom. She read for her PhD at Rhodes University in South
Africa and has published on ecological philosophy, feminism and science
fiction.