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Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy
“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 fiction’s 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 Fiction is a comprehensive, ambitious, and thought-provoking volume with invaluable research and resources for students and scholars. Bringing together 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 Fiction 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
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER AND SCIENCE FICTION
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) especially—but not exclusively—as 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 conversations—about the history of gender and genre, theoretical frameworks, subjectivities, medias and transmedialities, and transtemporalities—that 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.
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 (2018–present).
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 Women’s 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).
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER AND SCIENCE FICTION
Edited by Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson
Designed cover image: Derek Newman-Stille, “Surreality” (2022)
First published 2023 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-53701-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-53702-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08293-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934
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“A Bolt
Misha Grifka Wander
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
Graham J. Murphy 24 Trans Without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship Between Transness and Sex Changing in the Works of John Varley
Wendy Gay Pearson 25 Unruly Bodies: Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex Desire in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
Agnieszka Podruczna
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker 27 Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Sexual Pleasure and Desire in the Speculative Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo Hopkinson
Sara Wenger
29 Representation and Performance of Gender in Speculative Video Games and Game Mods
Paweł Frelik
30 Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory
Danielle Girard
31 Subverting, Re-fashioning, or Re-inscribing the Power of the Male Gaze: Feminism, Fashion, and Cyberpunk Style
Rebecca J. Holden
32 Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappiness
33 Afro-Feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction
34 Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club
Jaime Oliveros García and Alejandro López Lizana
35 The Queer Non Sequitur
Alex Prong
Gender and Sexuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Its Adaptations
John Rieder
37 Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent Mexican Films
Itala Schmelz
38 A Young, Black, Queer Woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monáe and Sci-Fi Queerness
Erik Steinskog
39 Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American
Dagmar Van Engen
52 A Riddle About a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity, and Misrecognition in Adam Roberts’s Bête 380
Jessica Suzanne Stokes
53 The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century 388 Mengtian Sun
1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022)
3.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #2” (2022)
16.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #3” (2022)
28.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #4” (2022)
41.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #5” (2022)
46.1
CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine, US, and is the author of many books on rhetoric, popular culture, and writing studies.
Marleen S. Barr is an independent scholar in the US. She is the author of Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies, and Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory and received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Jacob Barry is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, working on an arts-based participatory action research project that explores the experiences of gender-diverse folks accessing and engaging with care in New Brunswick, Canada.
Anna Bedford is a science fiction scholar and a Teaching and Learning Specialist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, US, where she also teaches Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Beyond Gender are a group of researchers, activists, and practitioners engaged in collective close readings of queer/trans/feminist science fiction, among their number are the authors of the chapter included in this volume: Amy Butt, Tom Dillon, Rachel Hill, Sing Yun Lee, Sinéad Murphy, Eleonora Rossi, Smin Smith, and Katie Stone.
Ritch Calvin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, US, and the author of Queering SF: Readings (2022).
Peyton Campbell is a PhD student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada whose PhD research explores the potential of queer hope in resisting climate fatalism and heteronormative futurity.
Laura Collier is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, where her research is in the intersection of emotions, activism, and speculative fiction.
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is Professor of German in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of North Texas, US, and has published extensively on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture.
Jane Donawerth is award-winning Professor Emerita of the University of Maryland, US, author of Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997) as well as many publications on women’s SF, Shakespeare, early modern women writers, and history of rhetoric.
M. Giulia Fabi is Associate Professor at the University of Ferrara, Italy, and the author of Passing and the Rise of the African-American Novel (2001) as well as of many publications on early African-American speculative fiction and on women writers.
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where he teaches and researches science fiction and video games.
Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean at Michigan State University, US, and focuses on Central and Eastern European science fiction and the amplification of global science fiction studies.
Terra Gasque is a PhD student in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, US, where she is completing her dissertation on “Transgressive Narratives: Using Queer Failure to Expand the Boundaries of Epiphanic Narrative Structure.”
Szilvia Gellai is a faculty member in the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and the author of Glass Scenographies. Notes on Spaces of One’s Own (2023).
Danielle Girard received their PhD from Lancaster University, England; they are currently working on both an edited collection and special issue on new queer television.
Joan Gordon, US, is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and a recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association Award for Lifetime Achievement in SF Scholarship.
Misha Grifka Wander is a PhD candidate in the Ohio State University English department, US, specializing in video game studies, comics studies, and speculative fiction studies, using an eco-critical and queer lens.
Rebecca J. Holden is Principal Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, US, and a critical scholar of feminist and African-American science fiction.
Kara Kennedy, PhD, is an independent scholar in New Zealand and author of Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science Fiction (2021).
Susan Knabe is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada; her current research focuses on queer temporalities.
Anna Kurowicka works at the American Studies Center at University of Warsaw, Poland, and publishes on asexuality in popular culture, disability in science fiction, and gender in speculative fiction.
Carlen Lavigne is the author of Post-Apocalyptic Patriarchy: American Television and Gendered Visions of Survival (2018) and Cyberpunk Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction (2013); she is Head of Communication Studies at Red Deer Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada.
Alejandro López Lizana, PhD, is Associate Lecturer at University of Granada, Spain, where he researches German literature with a focus on Comparative Literature and Transmediality.
Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and author of Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel (2020).
Kam Meakin is a doctoral researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Sussex, England, researching feminist dystopian fiction and UK-based activism.
Emily Midkiff teaches about children’s literature and literacy at the University of North Dakota, US, and is the author of Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children
Nedine Moonsamy is Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, whose scholarly research focuses on contemporary South African fiction and African SF; her debut novel, The Unfamous Five (Modjaji Books) was shortlisted for the HSS Fiction Award (2021) and her poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural New Contrast National Poetry Award (2021).
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak College, affiliated with the University of Gourbanga, India. His doctoral research was on Anglo-American spy fiction.
Graham J. Murphy is Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada and co-editor of Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), and Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives (2010), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
Jaime Oliveros García, PhD, is Visiting Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain, and a researcher of identity and video games.
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 Women’s 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).
Michael Pitts is Lecturer of English at the University of New York in Prague and author of Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man (2021).
Agnieszka Podruczna, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, who researches various aspects of speculative fiction (particularly North American speculative fiction by writers of color) in the context postcolonial studies.
Kathryn Prince is Associate Professor and Vice Dean at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where her research focuses on possible futures expressed in both fiction and non-fiction.
Alex Prong recently completed their MA from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and is looking forward to beginning work on a PhD in the near future.
Robin Anne Reid, PhD, was Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce, US, for twenty-seven years before retiring in May 2020 to pursue independent scholarship.
John Rieder, US, author of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), and Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present (2021), received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.
Katharina Scheerer is a PhD candidate at the University of Münster, Germany and co-editor of Where Are We Now? Orientierungen nach der Postmoderne (2022).
Itala Schmelz is a philosopher and curator in Mexico and author of the book Codigofagia. Mexican Cinema and Science Fiction
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University in Germany who received her PhD in Chinese Studies from the Free University of Berlin in June 2021.
R. Nicole Smith, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at Spelman College, US, and researches and publishes on Womanism, Black speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism.
Smin Smith is a researcher in science fiction art studies, a member of the Beyond Gender Research Collective, and Lecturer at University for the Creative Arts, UK.
E Mariah Spencer is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator in the US with a PhD in English from the University of Iowa.
Erik Steinskog is Associate Professor in musicology at the Department of Arts and Cultural studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and author of Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2018).
Jessica Suzanne Stokes is a disabled poet, educator, scholar, and PhD candidate at Michigan State University, US, and co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series.
Mengtian Sun is an independent scholar in science fiction studies who has worked in universities such as the University of Melbourne, Australia, and City University of Macao.
Dagmar Van Engen is Honors Faculty Fellow and Director of the Barrett Writing Center at Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University, US.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Culture Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside, US, and is the author of many groundbreaking books in the field of science fiction studies and speculative narrative.
Sara Wenger is a PhD candidate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, US, whose research interests include feminist technoscience studies, humanoid sex technologies, feminist science fiction, and representations of robots and artificial intelligence in popular culture.
Candice Wilson is Associate Professor at the University of North Georgia, US, who researches transgressive women in Japanese cinema.
Tobias Wilson-Bates is Assistant Professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, US, who works on nineteenth-century narrative histories of technology, ecology, and temporality.
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 (2018–present).
Ida Yoshinaga is a sansei media scholar who teaches science fiction and fantasy, screenwriting, and film and TV studies at Georgia Tech, US.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors wish to acknowledge everyone involved directly and indirectly with this collection that was imagined and set into motion in pre-pandemic Earth times. Since then, many of our families and communities around the world have been impacted by COVID-19 as well as new and existing social justice challenges and traumas. Those who were unable to join us in the collection, you are in our thoughts, and we wish you well until we meet again. Those who were able to submit and finish, we are grateful for your perseverance, wisdom, and critical visions of better futures. Beyond this, we also wish to thank several institutions by name for providing funding to support the production of this volume: the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, and the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 733/20). We also wish to dedicate the collection to Nichelle Nichols (1932–2022) for her courage, resilience, and vision.
PART I
What
Gender and Genre
Figure 1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022)
1
INTRODUCTION A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the Science Fiction Anthology
Lisa Yaszek
Introduction: The Long History of Gender and Genre
Fantastic fictions that challenge conventional ideas about the relations of science, society, and gender are as old as speculative storytelling itself. Looking backward, we might begin this tradition with stories including the 10th-century ad folkloric tale Kaguya Hime, in which a princess from the moon rejects courtship by Japan’s emperor for the company of her own people; the 1666 proto-novel The Blazing World, in which British author Margaret Cavendish casts herself as a dimension-traveling philosopher warrior queen who uses an alien army to save her homeland from invasion; and Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, which gave us both our first science fiction (SF) archetypes—the mad scientist, the misunderstood monster, and the imperiled scientist’s love interest—and the first modern critique of patriarchal science as dangerously unmoored from feminine and feminist sensibility. Traveling forward through time and space to the early 20thcentury United States, we see women writers take inspiration from their suffragist counterparts to demand equal representation both in the present and in our many imagined futures. In 1902–03, African American artist Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood thrills Black audiences and anticipates the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) by over a century with its vision of a hidden, high-tech African society protected by elite warrior women. Two decades later, White and mixed-race authors Clare Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, and Lilith Lorraine bring similarly shocking dreams of female futures to the emergent SF community. Their tales of daring lady astronauts, telepathic alien queens, and strong-willed love interests who rescue themselves do not go unnoticed: while the progressive-leaning editors of some magazines “like the idea of a woman invading the field [they] had opened” (Stone 101), a small but loud minority are less enthusiastic. In 1938 teenaged fan Donald G. Turnbull declares in a letter to the editor at Astounding that SF magazines should focus on “good wholesome free-from-women stories” because “a woman’s place is not in anything scientific,” and a teenaged Isaac Asimov agrees that “when we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames” and that “many top-notch, grade-A, wonderful, marvelous, etc., etc., authors get along swell without any women” (qt. in Larbalestier 119, 124).
Flash forward to recent decades, and at first it seems the song remains the same: the increasing visibility of women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC artists in the global SF community leads to hateful events including the RaceFail’09 flame war, the Gamergate controversy of 2014, and the block-voting controversies of Puppygate 2015 and 2016. In each case, a relatively small
group of United States-born White men loudly (and in some cases, violently) proclaimed that women and LGBTQ+ artists, especially those of color, were out to ruin the fun of popular culture for everyone with their insistence on exploring issues of diversity and social justice. And yet, women and nonbinary artists persist and thrive in SF across media and cultures today. Consider, for instance, Margaret Atwood’s award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1980 feminist dystopian novel that has spawned a film and an award-winning TV series by the same name and whose iconic red handmaid’s uniforms have become equally iconic symbols of feminist political protest; the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix film series, which neatly eviscerates Western culture’s most dearly held myths about the singular male Chosen One while meditating on the power of women, minority communities, and trans-consciousness; and Jeanette Ng’s 2019 Hugo Awards speech at the Dublin Worldcon, in which Ng celebrates SF as a “wonderful, ramshackle” genre that has outgrown the limiting influence of midcentury SF tastemaker John W. Campbell who, as an editor, was “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers and industrialists” (Ng). Meanwhile, the global SF community has sent a firm message to the architects of Puppygate by giving the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 2016, 2017, and 2018 to African American author N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, thereby making her the first author of any race or gender to win SF’s most prestigious award three times in a row. Clearly, people of all genders do indeed want to see female and LGBTQ+ heroes remaking the world in their own image.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (RCGSF) introduces readers to the ways that SF artists communicate their ideas about gender across centuries, continents, and cultures. The serious study of these issues has been an important part of the SF community since the 1970s, when women artists and fans were inspired by the revival of feminism and the creation of the first gender studies programs to create cons, fanzines, and publishing venues of their own. At the time, “gender” was often used as a euphemism for “women,” but the decades since have seen a more expansive view of the ways in which SF can question gender, including bringing feminist and queer perspectives to bear on masculinities and recognizing the existence and importance of transgender and nonbinary folx as both creators and consumers of SF. Gender has also been an important part of SF studies in academia since the field’s inception around the same time, generating numerous scholarly articles, monographs, special journal issues, and anthologies. The scholars and artists featured in RCGSF build upon these traditions of interdisciplinary inquiry by connecting established topics in gender studies and science fiction studies with emergent ideas from researchers in different media. As such, our Companion is the first large-scale reference collection of its kind to address new theories of gender intersectionality and diversity as they inform SF production around the globe.
Defining the Debate Over Gender and Genre: A Brief History of the SF Anthology
The RCGSF directly owes its existence to the conversations about gender and genre that have been part of the SF community for well over a century. Fittingly enough, many of these debates unfolded in and around the historical development of the SF anthology itself. This is especially true in the United States, where SF came together as a unique popular genre in the all-story magazines of the late 1800s and the specialized genre magazines that flourished in the early and mid-20th century. By the 1940s, however, readers were increasingly able to access SF through book collections as well. Anthologies were popular in an era dominated by ephemera such as newspapers and magazines because they were “less fragile, kept in print longer, [and]
available in libraries,” offering interested readers quick introductions to SF, its history, and its themes—indeed, genre anthologies were some of the earliest spaces where these subjects were first articulated. As expensive, hardcover publications, anthologies also made SF “more acceptable to parents” and even offered this newly named mode of storytelling a certain cultural legitimacy—especially important in an era when decency codes sometimes required shop keepers to store their SF magazines under the counter with other kinds of “lurid” literature (Nichols and Langford).
Much like their feminist counterparts in the political sphere, the main issue that women writers of this era grappled with was one of representation. In 1946 two respectable publishers commissioned the first major hardcover SF anthologies: Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas’s Adventures in Time and Space (Random House) and Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction (Crown Publishers). Taken together, these anthologies seemed to confirm the adage that SF really is all about “boys and their toys.” Although women in the SF community made up “about 15 percent of all contributors” at that time (Yaszek) and both anthologies included over three dozen stories, Conklin included just two women in his collection—Leslie F. Stone and C.L. Moore, co-writing with husband Henry Kuttner under the Lewis Padgett penname— while Healy and McComas included just one: C.L. Moore, again co-writing with husband Henry Kuttner under the Lewis Padgett penname. As the first canonical histories of SF, both anthologies minimized the impact of women writers in the genre: Moore was a well-established SF luminary in her own right by that time but was only represented through collaborative work with her husband under a male pseudonym, and Stone’s gender was essentially erased by Conklin who thought she was a man (despite the fact that her picture was often printed with her stories, in the fashion of the time) and who, upon learning the truth from Stone’s husband, blurted out, “are you telling me I used a story by a woman? I didn’t believe women could write science fiction!” (Stone 101). A few years later, when SF luminary Judith Merril began what fellow editor Anthony Boucher described as her “practically flawless” SF anthology editing career (which stretched over three decades and included her groundbreaking “Year’s Best” series from 1956–67), the import of her work was diminished by disaffected male colleagues who—in a rhetorical move that anticipated Puppygate—cast her as the architect of an SF “mafia” who threatened to ruin the fun of the genre by “imposing literary standards essentially alien to the field” (Latham 203–4).
SF anthologies took on heightened importance in the 1960s and 70s, when authors of experimental or “New Wave” SF placed their most groundbreaking work in the original story collections that were quickly replacing magazines as the center of generic innovation due to their “high pay, perceived prestige, and selectivity” (Horton). Over the course of the decade, authors and editors associated with anthology series including Damon Knight’s Orbit (1965–80), Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions (1971–81), Terry Carr’s Universe (1971–87), and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1968 and 1972) earned a “remarkable number of Hugo and Nebula” nominations and wins (Nicholls and Langford). While women still comprised a small but significant 15% of the SF community at this time, they were suddenly far more visible within the genre, taking home 19% of all Hugo Awards and 25% of all Nebula Awards—often for stories that first appeared in one of the original anthologies of the era. Male anthology editors were well aware of their female contributors’ star power. As Harlan Ellison succinctly put it: “the best writers in SF today are the women,” and in the late 1970s, Robert Silverberg gave the editorial reins of his prestigious New Dimensions series to award-winning feminist SF author Marta Randall (Ellison 229).
Feminist SF author and editor Pamela Sargent recalls that the “atmosphere of change” heralded by the New Wave attracted women to the genre because it suddenly seemed that their
stories “were likely to find a more receptive audience, even if [they] violated some of the traditional canons” (14). Inspired by the revival of feminism and the recovery of women’s history in newly established gender studies programs across the country, women writers of this era pioneered the first SF anthologies of their own, including Sargent’s Women of Wonder (1975), which established a herstory of women’s SF from the pulp era to the present and spawned a number of successor anthologies over the next two decades; Virginia Kidd’s Millennial Women (1977), in which all of the stories are written by women and have female protagonists; and Vonda N. McIntrye and Susan Janice Anderson’s Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976), which offered readers visions of the many truly strange new futures humans might inhabit after achieving gender equality. Today, feminist editors continue the project of recovering women’s SF in all its diverse forms with Detlef Münch’s The Woman of the Future 100 Years Ago: 7 Forgotten Feminist Utopias from 1988–1914 (Die Frau der Zukunft vor 100 Jahren: 7 vergessene feministische Utopien aus den Jahren 1899–1914, 2008); Alex Dally MacFarlane’s The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014); Ann VanderMeer’s Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015); Emmanuela Carbé, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Le Visionaire: Fantascienza, Fantasy, Fantasy e Femminismo: U’antologia (2018); and Lisa Yaszek’s The Future Is Female! series (2018–present).
The past three decades have also seen the rise of anthologies that, much like modern gender activism, challenge and expand our ideas about gender and genre. In 1987 Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to help other feminists understand that women’s experience of gender was not universal, but dependent on the complex and sometimes contradictory relations of both race and gender—an insight that subsequent feminists would extend to class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc. By the turn of the millennium, women would become leaders in producing new SF anthologies organized around issues of intersectionality, including Sheree Thomas’s Dark Matter series (2001, 2005); Nalo Hopkinson’s Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (2000) and So Long Been Dreaming (2004); Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán’s Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2003); Grace Dillon’s Walking the Clouds: An Indigenous Science Fiction Anthology (2012); and Nerine Dorman’s Terra Incognita, New Short Speculative Stories from Africa (2015). Indeed, insofar as these anthologies collect stories by BIPOC authors not usually found in traditional Eurowestern SF publishing venues, they ask us to reconsider not just who writes SF, but where it is written as well. In a similar vein, LGBTQ+ authors generate still other fantastic histories of SF with anthologies including Nicola Griffith and Steven Padgett’s Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998); Brit Mandelo’s Beyond the Gender Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Science Fiction (2012); the Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction series (various editors, 2016–2019); Joshua Whitehead’s Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (2020); and Paula Guran’s Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy (2021).
Defining the Debate Over Gender and Genre: The SF Studies Anthology
Like their artistic counterparts, feminists and other progressive-minded scholars have long been interested in the relations of gender and genre in SF. Indeed, early feminist SF scholarship often came from within the genre community itself, including Joanna Russ’s landmark essay “The Image of Women in Science Fiction” (1970), which argued that “there are plenty of images of women in science fiction . . . [but] hardly any women” (39) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “American SF and the Other” (1975), which depicted SF as a “baboon patriarchy” with “rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top” and “then, at the bottom, the poor, the uneducated, the faceless
masses, and all the women” (210). While Russ placed her essay in the Red Clay Reader, scholarly journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies had featured essays about women writers since their inception in 1959 and 1973, respectively, and by the mid-1970s both were publishing decidedly feminist analyses of SF such as Le Guin’s “American SF” (which first appeared in Science Fiction Studies) and Mary Kenny Badami’s “A Feminist Critique of Science Fiction” (Extrapolation, 1976). Perhaps not surprisingly, this era also saw the publication of the first feminist SF studies anthology, Marleen S. Barr’s Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981)—a collection that spawned the subsequent volumes Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities (2000) and Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New Wave Trajectory (2008). The same era also saw the beginning of serious studies of sexuality and non-normative gender expression with the publication of Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo’s comprehensive annotated bibliography, Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (1983).
As the trajectory of Barr’s anthologies indicate, over the past half century, SF scholars, like their artistic counterparts, have become increasingly interested in expanding our ideas about gender in SF. By the 1980s and 90s, the development of new communication and information technologies coupled with the advent of global capitalism led a new generation of feminists to propose that thinking carefully about the relations of science, society, and gender should be a central priority for all women. This argument was advanced perhaps most famously by cultural theorist Donna Haraway, who appropriated the figure of the part-organic, part-technological figure of the cyborg from SF an ideal metaphor for modern political activists and argued that feminist SF authors are “our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in hightech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs” (173). This notion is very much at the heart of much feminist SF scholarship of that era as well, especially in anthologies such as Takayumi Tatsumi’s Cyborg Feminism (Saibogu feminizumu, 1991); Jenny Wolmark’s Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace (1999); Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, and Kathryn Woodward’s The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (2000); Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth’s Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (2002); and many of the essays in Karola Maltry et al.’s Gendered Future: On the Transformation of Feminist Visions in Science Fiction (Genderzukunft: zur transformation feministischer visionen in der science fiction, 2008). This line of investigation continues today with Sherryl Vint and Sumeyra Buran’s edited collection, Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction (2022) and Ramona Onnis, Anna Chiara Palladino, and Manuela Spinelli’s Feminist Science Fiction: Imagining Gender in Contemporary Italian Culture (Fantascienza femminista: immaginare il genere nella cultura italiana contemporanea, 2022).
Like their literary peers, feminist scholars also produce anthologies of criticism dedicated to issues of intersectionality in SF; indeed, this is perhaps the fastest growing area of feminist SF inquiry today. Such anthologies include Wendy Gay Pearson, Joan Gordon, and Veronica Hollinger’s Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008); Francesca T. Bartini’s Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction (2017); and Cristina Jurado and Lola Roble’s Daughters of the Future: Science Fiction, Fantastic and Marvelous Literature from a Feminist Perspective (Hijas del futuro: Literatura de ciencia ficción, fantástica, y de lo maravilloso desde la mirada feminista, 2021). Intersectionality is also central to transmedia studies of gender in SF, including Valerie E. Frankel’s Outlander’s Sassenachs: Essays on Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the Novel and Television Series (2016); Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olguin’s Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2018); Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley’s The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics (2018); and Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart’s Women of Ice and
Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements (2016). While most anthologies of feminist SF criticism are, logically enough, published by academic presses, the feminist SF publisher Aqueduct Press has also made important contributions to feminist SF scholarship with the eleven-volume WisCon Chronicles Series (2007–17), edited by authors and scholars including L. Timmel Duchamp, Rebecca J. Holden, and Jaymee Goh. As an archive of the various events that take place at the world’s largest and oldest feminist science fiction convention (held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin), each anthology directs readers attention to different conversations unfolding amongst artists, editors, scholars, and fans in the feminist SF community at any given time, including “Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future”; “Shattering Ableist Narratives”; and “Intersections and Alliances.”
Even as they look forward to the future of gender in genre fiction, feminists engaged in SF scholarship also produce anthologies honoring the accomplishments of the pioneering women writers and critics who came before them. Many historically oriented collections focus specifically on women’s contributions to the utopian tradition, including Barbara HollandCunz’s Feminist Utopias: The Dawn of a Postpatriarchal Society (Feministiche Utopien: Aufbruch in die postpatriarchale Geselleschaft, 1986); Jane Donawerth and Carol Kolmerton’s Utopian and Science Fiction: Worlds of Difference (1994); and Sharon R. Wilson’s Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (2013). Meanwhile, the feminist scholars featured in Helen Merrick’s Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through Feminism and Science Fiction (1999) and Justine Larbalestier’s Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006) more directly celebrate the accomplishments of women in SF proper. Feminist scholars have also produced essay collections honoring the accomplishments of pioneering feminist SF icons real and imaginary, including Lindsey Tucker’s Critical Essays on Angela Carter (1988); Farah Mendelsohn’s On Joanna Russ (2012); Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl’s Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013); and Linda Mizejewski and Tanya D. Zuk’s Our Blessed Rebel Queen: Essays on Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia (2021).
In 1995, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards provocatively declared that “on a personal level feminism is everywhere, like fluoride” (18) and that certainly seems to be true at least in the realm of SF scholarship. Thematic SF essay collections tackle a wide range of topics, ranging from Sherry Ginn and Michael G. Cornelius’s The Sex Is out of This World: Essays on the Carnal Side of Science Fiction (2012) to Nadine Farghaly and Simon Bacon’s To Boldly Go: Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe (2017) to Bridget Barclay and Christy Tidwell’s Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018). Many thematic SF essay collections explore how issues of gender and genre change not just over time, but by culture as well. Such work began in 1992 with pioneering feminist SF fan Janice Bogstadt’s dissertation, “Gender, Power and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-American and French Feminist Science Fiction” and continues today in collections such as Silvia G. Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel De Rosso’s Science Fiction in Latin America: Criticism. Theory. History. (2020) and Ramona Onnis, Anna Chiara Palladino, and Manuela Spinelli’s Feminist Science Fiction: Imagining Gender in Contemporary Italian Culture (Fantascienza femminista: immaginare il genere nella cultura italiana contemporanea, 2022). Essays on SF and gender also feature prominently in non-SF collections such as Debra FaszerMcMahon, Victoria L. Ketz, and Dawn Smith-Sherwood’s A Laboratory of Her Own: Women and Science in Spanish Culture (2021) and Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey’s Ecofeminism in Dialog (2018). And finally, perhaps the greatest testament to the pervasiveness and diversity of thinking about gender in SF are the dozens of essays collected in Robin Anne Reid’s Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2009), a two-volume collection that offers both surveys of major topics including sexual identities, fandom, and science as well as more focused examinations of authors and literary traditions.
Section Overview
Building upon the work of their predecessors, the authors featured in this volume provide protocols for critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in SF, especially—but not exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists. 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 around the globe. Their chapters are grouped into five conversations—about how the SF community treats issues of gender and genre, important ways of theorizing gender and genre, the SF scholars and artists who have led such efforts, the moments that have enabled paradigm shifts, and how these paradigm shifts are enacted—that are central to discussions of gender and SF in the current moment. Additionally, this Companion includes original cover art from nonbinary Canadian artist Derek Newman-Stille, whose use of mixed media forms and aesthetic traditions mirrors the expansive energy of the gender- and genre-bending SF storytelling considered by our contributors, and each section or conversation begins with an original piece by Israeli artist Gili Ron, who was inspired by feminist artists such as Georgia O’Keefe and Eva Hild to create a sequence of computer-generated shapes and patterns that explore mathematics, nature, and gender in ways that orient—and reorient—readers to the topics at hand in each section.
The first section of this book, “What: Gender and Genre,” begins with the current chapter, which reviews the long history of debates over the proper relations of gender and genre in the SF community, especially as they intersect with the process of creating SF as a distinct mode of storytelling through anthologies of stories and criticism. Next, SF film scholar Ida Yoshinaga talks with SF authors Joyce Chng, Jaymee Goh, Lehua Parker, Bogi Takács, and Andrea Hairston about their favorite examples of gender expression in both their own work and SF across media. In Part II, “How: Theoretical Approaches,” scholars from around the globe survey different theoretical approaches to issues of gender in science fiction, including feminisms, queer studies, Black women’s studies, disability studies, and ecocr iticism. The authors featured in Part III, “Who: Subjectivities,” explore how different scholars and artists reflect on nonbinary gender identities, dynamic subjectivities, and new and old critical positionalities that are politicized, aestheticized, and often materialized in works of science fiction art and criticism. The authors collected in Part IV, “Where: Media and Transmedialities,” examine the different media in which genre and gender frameworks are developed, the political and aesthetic possibilities opened by such media productions, and the ways such productions invite us to think through larger issues of science, technology, and society. Finally, those included in Part V, “When: Transtemporalities,” do not aim to be all encompassing but address moments and movements in SF and in gender studies where paradigms have shifted, thereby allowing audiences to look towards futurities, alternate temporalities, and all manners of futural and historical thought.
Bibliography
Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Boucher, Anthony. “Recommended Reading.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1954, p. 93.
Ellison, Harlan. “Introduction to Joanna Russ’s ‘When It Changed.’ ” Again, Dangerous Visions. Doubleday, 1972, pp. 229.
