“Stripped down to the glittering nodes”

Opening with paired scenes of trans* cyborg orgasm and closing with a call for an ecstatic queer cyberpunk future, this essay argues that queer cyberpunk science fiction can challenge prevalent anthropocentric conceptions of intelligence, desire, and identity by envisioning future intelligence that is at once transgender, transhuman, and transcorporeal. Through a reading of two contemporary queer cyberpunk texts, Autonomous by Annalee Newitz and The Membranes 《膜》 by Chi Ta-wei 紀大偉, the essay engages literary, queer, trans*, and posthuman theory to analyze the speculative future-looking trans* imaginings of three nodes: hybrid human boundaries, authenticity / autonomy, and transitioning brain-body dynamics.