The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is the first large-scale reference work of its kind, critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in science fiction, especiallybut not exclusivelyas explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is the first large-scale reference work of its kind, critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in science fiction (SF) especiallybut not exclusivelyas explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world.
This global volume builds upon the traditions of interdisciplinary inquiry by connecting established topics in gender studies and science fiction studies with emergent ideas from researchers in different media. Taken together, they challenge conventional generic boundaries; provide new ways of approaching familiar texts; recover lost artists and introduce new ones; connect the revival of old, hate-based politics with the increasing visibility of imagined futures for all; and show how SF stories about new kinds of gender relations inspire new models of artistic, technoscientific, and political practice. Their chapters are grouped into five conversationsabout the history of gender and genre, theoretical frameworks, subjectivities, medias and transmedialities, and transtemporalitiesthat are central to discussions of gender and SF in the current moment. A range of both emerging and established names in media, literature, and cultural studies engage with a huge diversity of topics including eco-criticism, animal studies, cyborg and posthumanist theory, masculinity, critical race studies, Indigenous futurisms, Black girlhood, and gaming.
This is an essential resource for students and scholars studying gender, sexuality, and/or science fiction.
Recenzijos
"Science fiction has been questioning gender norms since before there was science fiction (think Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman). This lively and comprehensive new volume, edited by leading scholars in the field, surveys science fictions powerful techniques for exploring difference and exposing injustice. The essays demonstrate how far both the genre itself and scholarly responses to it have come since the early days of feminist critique. Contributors look at thought-experiments about queer or nonbinary societies and gender systems derived from non-European cultures as well as at the explosion of science fictional thinking in animation, comics, and other media. As new discoveries about the varieties of human experience and new technologies turn absolutes into mere possibilities, books like this serve as tour guides to a new reality."
--Brian Attebery, author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and Fantasy: How It Works
"The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science is a comprehensive, ambitious, and thought-provoking volume with invaluable research and resources for students and scholars. Bringing together voices of science fiction writers, established scholars, and new voices, this book establishes important links between gender studies and science fiction studies. As this anthology shows, science fiction offers a unique site to explore gender issues including identity, bodies, social issues, race, animal studies, among many other topics. Readers of the Routledge Companion to Gender and Science will receive a graduate-level course in the relevance of science fiction for gender, and gender for science fiction. The book's sophisticated analysis is presented in accessible and engaging prose."
--Robin Roberts, author of A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction and Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons
"Fritzsche, Omry, Pearson, and Yaszek bring together an array of established and emerging critical voices in science fiction and gender studies to create this comprehensive companion. A wide array of scholarship ranging from theory to history to media studies addresses canonical authors like Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood alongside discussions of Black, Indian, Mexican, Chinese and Japanese authors and creators. The editors inclusion of BIPOC and global voices and topics is a deliberate choice to move beyond a white, Western view of feminism and gender studies in science fiction scholarship. Essential reading for anyone interested in representations of gender and identity in science fiction literature, theory, and media."
--Joy Sanchez-Taylor, author of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color
"This unique collection emerges from what Donna Haraway has referred to as "situated knowledge," that is, knowledge firmly embedded and contextualized in the particularities of histories, cultures, and social formations. Its chapters demonstrate the inextricably intersectional nature of gender and sexuality as these messy and complex categories are embodied in all their differences in speculative fictions from around the world and through equally wide-ranging scholarly considerations. None of the sections here are identified by geography: no privileged works or sites or voices dominate this wide-ranging conversation. Queerness and diversity are the norms, and with skill and panache the editors have put together a collection that comes very near to the realization of their utopian ambitions."
--Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies
Part One, What: Gender and Genre
"Introduction: A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the Science
Fiction Anthology"
Lisa Yaszek
"Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction"
Ida Yoshinaga
Part Two, How: Theoretical Approaches
"Introduction to How: Theoretical Approaches"
Lisa Yaszek
"Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaids Tale"
Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint
"Beyond Survival: Climate Change and Reproduction in The Handmaids Tale,
Birthstones, and The Fifth Season"
Anna Bedford
"Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many"
Beyond Gender Research Collective
"Queer SF"
Ritch Calvin
"Renovating the System: The Matrix Resurrections and Trans Resistance to
Neoliberal Integration"
Terra Gasque
"Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish: Feminisms and Animal Studies in Science
Fiction"
Joan Gordon
"Asexual and Genderless Futures"
Anna Kurowicka
"Making the End Times Great Again: Post-Apocalypses, Preppers, and the
Politics of Patriarchy on American Television"
Carlen Lavigne
"Decoding Masculinity in 21st Century Science Fiction by Men: Two Case
Studies in Reconceptualizing Patriarchy"
Sara Martķn
"I Came for the Pew-Pew Space Battles; I Stayed for the Autism": Martha
Wells Murderbot"
Robin Reid
"The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Alexis Pauline Gumbss Evidence"
R. Nicole Smith
"Feminist Science Fiction Art"
Smin Smith
Part Three, Who: Subjectivities
"Introduction"
Wendy Gay Pearson
"All Hail the Trans Cyborg" Autonomous as an Analogy of Trans Becoming"
Jacob Barry
"Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency"
Peyton Campbell
"Like A Bolt Out of the Blue: Stories of Gender Transformation from the
GDR"
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming
"New Pronouns and New Uses: Gender Variance and Language in Contemporary
Science Fiction"
Misha Grifka Wander
"Not Just Boys and Toys: Gender and Intersectionality in SF for Children"
Emily Midkiff
"Speculations against Gender Discrimination: A Study of the Indian
Speculative Fictions Growing Engagement with Gender Issues"
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
"Feminist Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunks Hetero-Masculinism"
Graham J. Murphy
"Trans without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship between Transness
and Sex Change in the Works of John Varley"
Wendy Gay Pearson
"Unruly Bodies: Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex Desire in Larissa
Lais Salt Fish Girl"
Agnieszka Podruczna
"Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe: Explorations of Traditional Chinese
Gender Roles in Chi Huis Nest of Insects"
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker
"Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Portrayals of Sex and Desire in the
Speculative Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo Hopkinson"
Sara Wenger
Part Four, Where: Media and Transmedialities
"Introduction"
Keren Omry
"Representation and Performance of Gender in Science Fiction Video Games and
Game Mods"
Pawe Frelik
"Parodying Captain Kirk Through the Drift in Cultural Memory"
Danielle Girard
"Subverting, Re-fashioning, or Re-inscribing the Power of the Male Gaze:
Feminism, Fashion, and Cyberpunk Style"
Rebecca J. Holden
"Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappines"
Susan Knabe
"Afro-feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction"
Nedine Moonsamy
"Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club"
Jaime Oliveros Garcķa and Alejandro López Lizana
"The Queer Non Sequitur"
Alex Prong
"Gender and Sexuality in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and its Adaptations"
John Rieder
"Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent Mexican Films"
Itala Schmelz
"A young, Black, queer woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monįe and sci-fi
queerness"
Erik Steinskog
"Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet
Culture"
Dagmar Van Engen
"Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time Travelling Girl"
Candice Wilson and Tobias Wilson-Bates
Part Five, When: Transtemporalities
"Introduction"
Sonja Fritzsche
"Naomi Aldermans The Power and New Feminist Science Fiction Superheroes"
Marlene S. Barr
"Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia"
Laura Collier and Kathryn Prince
"Science? Fiction? SF by Women in the Magazines"
Jane Donawerth
"Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction"
M. Gulia Fabi
"Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave"
Szilvia Gellai
"The Role of Historical Amnesia and Restorative Nostalgia in The Handmaids
Tale Protests: The Limits of the Contemporary White Feminist Dystopian
Imagination"
Kate Meakin
"Tracing Second-Wave Feminism through Women in the Dune Series"
Kara Kennedy
"Complicating the Super Man: Evolving Masculinities in US-American Science
Fiction"
Michael Pitts
"Between Stove and EmancipationConservative Women and Anti-Utopian
Imaginations in Early German Science Fiction"
Katharina Scheerer
"Mistress of a World: Margaret Cavendish, Gender, & Science Fiction in
Early Modern England"
E. Mariah Spencer
"A Riddle about a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity, and
Misrecognition in Adam Robert's Bźte"
Jessica Stokes
"The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century"
Mengtian Sun
Lisa Yaszek is Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, US, and past president of the Science Fiction Research Association; her recent books include Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Future Is Female! series (2018present).
Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean at Michigan State University, US, and focuses on Eastern European science fiction and the amplification of global science fiction studies.
Keren Omry is Senior Lecturer of contemporary US fiction at the University of Haifa, Israel, where she researches and teaches on Alternate Histories, Science Fiction, and African-American literature.
Wendy Gay Pearson is Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada whose research focuses on queer and trans science fiction; with Veronica Holinger and Joan Gordon, she is co-editor of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008).
