The larger question I want to ask concerns the malleable body and its usefulness to cultural theorists of gender: is the SF body a more useful image than the transgender body for this kind of cultural work? In order to answer this question, I will first provide a description of the malleable body in each of these novels, before turning to an analysis of the ideological effects of each representation. Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia and John Varley's Steel Beach, to interrogate their representation of gender and the effectiveness of this representation as a critique of the sex/gender system. I'm going to explore the representation of the gender-fluid SF body in two SF texts, Samuel R. This ability makes SF bodies a potentially useful site for challenging the cultural construction of gender. Not limited by what Anne Balsamo has called 'the irreducible distinctiveness of the material body,' SF bodies can inhabit any gender - male, female, something in between, or nothing at all - and can switch with ease from one to the other. Through the trope of perfected technology, SF is able to raise questions about the malleability of gender identity given a perfectly malleable body. In the world of SF, gender reassignment surgery can occur with an ease that is not possible in our own world. In this article, I would like to consider what speculative fiction (SF) can contribute to this discussion. Both their own self-representations and the use of their image by cultural theorists struggle with the nature/nurture, biology/culture debate, and the question of how best to challenge the current sex/gender system. Transgender people themselves are torn between occupying a subject position that inherently challenges the sex/gender system and a requirement (now receding) to articulate their 'problem' in terms of essentialized gender identity so that they meet the psychological standard for gender reassignment surgery.

Other critics, such as Raymond, insist that the material body remains essentially male or female, and that the target of critique should be the system of gendered social behaviours that we attach to these gendered bodies. Readings such as Butler's argue that the production of gender identity as a cultural system extends even to the materiality of the body itself, unduly limiting the range of bodily morphologies that could materialize, in Butler's double-meaning of that term. From Judith Butler's celebration of drag as that which reveals that all gender is a performance, to Janice Raymond's characterization of transsexuals as an empire of men bent on subverting feminism from within, theorists of gender have found in transgendered people an extraordinary range of meanings and ideological agendas. The figure of the transsexual or transvestite circulates as an extremely charged image in contemporary debates about sex and gender.

Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany