The poetics of cyborg characters in Marge Piercy's novels

This article theorizes a poetics of cyborg characterization in Marge Piercy’s fiction by offering close readings of He, She and It (1991; Body of Glass) and situating it alongside Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and related texts. Framing analysis through four narratological modes—monologue, dialogue, landscape, and portrait—the study argues that Piercy reimagines the cyborg not as a spectacle of prosthesis but as a social, ethical, and affective subject whose personhood is co-authored by community. Interior focalization (monologue) traces Yod’s apprenticeship in feeling and judgment, rendering posthuman interiority as iterative learning rather than innate lack. Dialogic scenes—domestic, juridical, and pedagogical—function as para-Turing encounters in which idiom, humor, and misprision negotiate consent, agency, and rights across human/machine asymmetries. Environmental description (landscape)—corporate domes, toxic “Glop,” and precarious free-towns—operates as a techno-ecological chronotype that selects for particular embodiments and labor regimes, making the cyborg an index of environmental justice. Finally, descriptive imaging (portrait) privileges process over spectacle: the ostensibly “perfect” body of Yod is read as a palimpsest of code, care work, and communal inscription rather than a closed artifact. Comparative soundings with William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, and Annalee Newitz clarify Piercy’s distinct contribution: a feminist, communitarian cyborgs that binds embodiment to reciprocity, law, and survivance. The essay thus provides a portable analytic for reading posthuman fiction and demonstrates how Piercy’s cyborgs displace ontological essence with relational performance, where personhood emerges in situated practices of speech, care, and place.