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"No Woman Born" ( 1 944) is a short story by American woman science fiction writer C. L. Moore and is a narrative about a female protagonist called Deirdre, whose body has been destroyed and reconstructed into a cyborg. Transformed into a technologically enhanced woman, Deirdre possesses more than human capabilities. However, Deirdre's new guise as a cyborg is problematic to the men in Moore's text. They consider that, as a human machine, Deirdre is no longer female and therefore will lose touch with humanity. Finally, as a cyborg, Deirdre is left to face a future alone. Feminist interest in the cyborg figure has produced some excellent and thought provoking readings of "No Woman Born." These readings have focused on the relationship between women and technology (Shaw; Kakoudaki; Stevenson), on issues relating to gender identity (Baccolini), and gender as performance (Hollinger; Kakoudaki). However, with the exception of Jane Donawerth's analysis of Moore's text, which argues that the inferiority of the mechanical woman is literalised through the disabled body (Donawerth 61), none have considered Moore's cyborg text as a narrative permeated with a language that alludes to the disabled subject and what this may mean in relation to the representation of gender in her story at the time of its publication.
This paper seeks to explore the discourse of disability in Moore's text, arguing that "No Woman Born" reflects anxieties about gender and disability during wartime America. To explain, World War II was a time of great social upheaval, which disrupted the gendered social order. Women proved their adeptness in roles normally reserved for men, while in the theatre of war, male soldiers were emasculated by the trauma of modern warfare. The rehabilitation of the physically impaired male body became a national concern and intersected with science fiction's preoccupation with the techno-body, giving rise to the popular image of the disabled subject as an enhanced human-machine (Serlin, "The Other Arms Race" 52). Discourses of the disabled body as a technologically enabled body intertwined with discourses of gender, as rehabilitation programmes encouraged physically impaired war veterans to not only prove their mastery and control over the technology that assisted them, but also to approximate, or at least aspire to the gender norms that defined the masculine...