I don’t want to be a woman, I just want to look cute.
I didn’t see the commentary as “all crosdressers are trans” but more as a complaint that the possibility is even on the table and played as a joke.
Im no scholar of the genre I dont think marxism can fix cyberpunk, im gonna be honest. You strike - you get gunned down by robotized police force, and even if you weren’t it ain’t like there ain’t people hungry enough to take your job. Solidarity of the people is completely eroded by the fact that you have to fight with others just like you for basic resources. Individuality is all people have left, sometimes not even that. There is no law beyond money. Where do you even start trying?
cyberpunk as a genre is fundamentally a critique of capitalism
to quote William Gibson talking about Ronald Reagan,
“His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.”
Yes, I am aware, specifically a satire of it, no?
i guess i could be considered something of a scholar of the genre myself since i run https://cyberpunk.lol/ and https://cyberpunk.gay/ lmao
This feels a little defeatist. Obviously cyberpunk media is usually meant to be dystopian and bleak but a common theme among them is resistance. That’s part of the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk. Consider how prevalent hackers are in cyberpunk and one can realize that the robo-police can be shut down by someone with a keyboard. As for everyone being hyper-individualist and out for themselves, one could say the same about our world rn, or at least in much of the West but that’s because most people under capitalism are not class conscious. Building Marxism requires educating oppressed people on why their interests as a class are aligned against the oppressor class. It may seem impossible to create this better alternative to capitalism, especially in the context of a cyberpunk setting, but people thought the same thing about monarchy and feudalism. Just my two cents.
It’s much easier to organize the workers under feudalism, because they’ll be in the same places slaving away together under the same king. In cyberpunk, everyone lives in isolated pods and gets their news through the corpo networks. The few interactions they have with other people are in subcultures and gangs, but every other gang will be “an enemy” even though they’re the same class.
There’s also no obvious “king” to rally against. Neuromancer has the Tessier-Ashpools, but they’re smart enough to live in space and stay out of the public eye. Some corporations are more like sentient beings, where even the C-suite only live to serve the machine. Who’s going to overthrow Hosaka when it provides millions with jobs and stability? And how? The only entity with the means and the motive would be another corp, which doesn’t change the system so much as the name on a building.
And yet all that resistance ends up translating to individualistic defiance, sabotaging one power just to reluctantly grant advantage to another, sometimes terrorism. I guess if we strayed far enough from the common tropes of the genre, then yes you are right. But remember what is the origin of the genre - to my understanding, in its core it exists as satirical critique of neoliberal policy. I dunno, it feels essential to me, but genres are constructed
sabotaging one power just to reluctantly grant advantage to another, sometimes terrorism
Sounds just like the Cold War TBH
Go play Watch Dogs 2 for some anarchist collective action cyberpunk.
I rarely play AAA games, especially ones made by Ubisoft. I did spend some time with the first one tho and yeah, I can see it being classified as “early stage cyberpunk”, but it’s quite far from the aesthetic of the genre I have in mind, my favorite cyberpunk games being Ruiner (and Shadowrun but that also has orks and magic, so ya know). Perhaps am a genre purist
The second one is about a hacker commune trying to take down big tech
Also, transitioning is an individual decision that a protagonist can just unilaterally decide to pursue. I can see how that’s seen as an obvious answer to the internal conflicts that a crossdressing protagonist is facing if they are actually trans.
Dismantling the existing socioeconomic structures of society in cyberpunk (usually controlled by some highly militarized, brutal corporate surveillance state) and replacing it with ones that better embodies Marxist ideals is not as simple as someone saying “let’s just try that.” Even if it were an obvious answer, it’s an answer that would first require the story to answer a thousand other “how do we get there” questions before it can be reached.
I think it’s less ‘fix’ and more ‘make irrelevant’.
In a society that doesn’t care too much about gender, crossdressing stops being anything of note.
Similarly, if you think about a cyberpunk society through a Marxist lens (or use a bit of common sense), you quickly see the flaw in the premise.
it’s one where the premise could be defeated by Marxism, but if Marxism was widely adopted then cyberpunk could not exist. The genre is inherently tied to a capitalist dystopia where existence is controlled by megacorporations; if you remove that you no longer have cyberpunk.
Although I’d also say transitioning doesn’t fix crossdressing manga, since crossdressing is something people can do even if they are comfortable with their gender identity, so I guess the meme still works in a “It doesn’t fix it at all but instead completely erases the concept and turns it into something else” sort of way.
