Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature

“….Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature will be a key text both for scholars of Latin American science fiction and the fantastic and for any scholar interested in the role that the written word continues to play in an increasingly audiovisual society.” —David Dalton, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of North Carolina “This book shows how Mexican cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk literature ‘reflects’ the way technology is transforming subjectivity while also anticipating new modes of subjectivity that are absent in other types of cultural works. Tobin reads these literary texts in dialogue with works on technological remediation, cyborg theory, and theories of media and visuality, but also carefully provides contextual information as needed.” —Miguel García, Assistant Professor of Mexican Studies, Arizona State University. This monograph explores a variety of Mexican cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives whose themes primarily engage with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce. With all these works published during and influenced by the country’s neoliberal era (1993–2014), these 'specular fictions' register and critique the rising dominance in this period of the smaller screens of television, computers, and smartphones, all of which alter the country’s broader visual field in relation to the electronic image. Optical motifs include ocular prostheses and the male gaze, television and ultraviolent reality-TV programs, holograms, and augmented-reality glasses; together they signal a heteropatriarchal social order, the body’s impending obsolescence, an evolving society of the spectacle, and smartphones as signifiers of class difference and fake news. This work analyzes the visual regimes depicted in these literary narratives by examining their complex links with broader socioeconomic changes, political shifts, and cultural transformations occurring in Mexico. Stephen C. Tobin is an assistant adjunct professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches literature and film classes on Latin American science fiction, posthumanism, speculative ecocriticism, and organized the 2022 symposium Surviving the Anthropocene: Speculative Fictions from Latin America’s Past, Present, and Futures. This is his first monograph.