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Abstract
This dissertation focuses on the fiction of three women of color – Octavia E. Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor – who deploy and develop cyberpunk themes related to the body, gender, race, and hybridity in their fiction. Each author radically reconfigures the human and the human condition, creating counter-hegemonic texts that disrupt western theories of personhood which privilege the mind over the body. Butler, Jemisin, and Okorafor anticipate and interrogate current global political and social problems from non-dominant positions, providing a valuable counterpoint to the hegemonic features of cyberpunk itself. Butler’s fiction is biopunk, a subtype of cyberpunk that focuses on biological posthumanism. Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis trilogy (1987-1989) explores the legacies of western hegemony, exposing the infrastructure of Empire through an alien species. In similar fashion, Jemisin atomizes the mind/body problem by personifying core cyberpunk tropes In the DC comic series Far Sector (2019-), deconstructing both cyberpunk and a mass culture icon—Green Lantern. Nnedi Okorafor synthesizes cyberpunk and space opera to problematize radical individualism and hybridity simultaneously in her Binti (2015-2019) novellas. All three authors and their texts reassemble the mind and body as an inseparable unit, rejecting the disembodied consciousness privileged in Enlightenment thought (and some cyberpunk).