This goes back to what Heather J. Hicks states about the importance and success of the ideal feminine body compared to the non-ideal feminine body. P. Burke’s body is considered unimportant and the way the story is written and paced suggests just that. Another theme of The Girl Who Was Plugged In is the performance of gender. According to Veronica Hollinger, this story is about P. Burke’s pursuit of the ideal feminine body. P. Burke desperately wants to achieve this ideal body, but she cannot due to her physical appearance. According to Hollinger, P. Burke is performing the gender ideal through a distance by controlling Delphi. Hollinger states that P. Burke’s performance here gives her an opportunity that she would not otherwise have given her real body to “mimic acceptable femininity". She also says that P. Burke “is the divinely feminine Delphi as long as she performs Delphi. Burke is the actor and Delphi is her role”. This performance was P. Burke’s way to a fairy-tale ending. Delphi can only be feminine if she were to be performed in a feminine way. Hollinger’s entire analysis can be seen in parallel with the analysis of Heather J. Hicks when she discusses how P. Burke uses Delphi to push herself up in the ranks of society. In order to have more opportunities in the society presented, P. Burke must perform femininity through Delphi. The depiction of the body in "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" has been discussed by several feminist literary scholars. Amongst them are Scott Bukatman, Melissa Colleen Stevenson, Veronica Hollinger and Heather J. Hicks. Major themes in "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", as seen in the aforementioned authors articles referenced in this section, include disembodiment and re-embodiment, performance of femininity, oppression of the female body by cultural power structures and the female body in a technological society. Veronica Hollinger, co-editor of the scholarly journal "Science Fiction Studies" of DePauw University, states in her article, "(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender", that women are forced to conform to a constructed ideal of femininity in order to avoid being seen as a failure or, to some extent, incomplete. To Hollinger, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is about the ways women experience pressure from society to fulfill the set standards of femininity as seen in P. Burke's desperate desire to fully leaving her real body and re-embody permanently as Delphi.