Feminist Science Fiction Studies

Presented 2-11-16 @ King's College (PA) (for Socratic Society)

In the wake of the popularity of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I endeavor to use the movie to explain some philosophy, and use philosophy to explain and explore some of the movie. To do this I answer criticisms of the movie, and then attempt to answer a number of questions the movie raised:

- Was the plot of Episode VII derivative of Episode IV (A New Hope)?
- How was Rey able to defeat Kylo?
- Is J.J. Abrams a feminist?
- What’s the deal with Kylo’s lightsaber?
- Who is Supreme Leader Snoke?
- Why did Luke go into hiding? (Does he have a plan?)
- Who are Rey’s parents? (And is Rey going bad?)

A version of the presentation, with audio, is available on Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFizt76bh5k

Female science fiction writers are about to occupy a significant spot on the genre's author scene in China. At least since August 2016, when Hao Jingfang (*1984) became the first Chinese woman to win the Hugo Award, it is clear that they are as successful as their male counterparts. Since the introduction of science fiction literature to China in the late Qing dynasty, the scene was male-dominated. Nevertheless, in connection with the current heyday it has lately evolved more diversified.
This paper examines social and political commentary in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by women. I argue that these writings pose challenging views of a future Chinese society as well as provide suggestions for a more equal society. Through a close reading of Hao Jingfang’s novella “Folding Beijing” (2014) and her short story “Invisible Planets” (2010), this paper analyzes the discrepancies between the official image and her perceptions of the “Harmonious Society” and the “China Dream”.

Comment éviter les pièges de la binarité lorsqu'on est un costumier trans ? Je traverse dans cette recherche les liens entre les textiles et les binarités structurelles (homme/femme, hétérosexuel/homosexuel, sain/malade). Il s'agit en premier lieu de comprendre en quoi l'histoire de la médecine a construit ces binarités. Ensuite, j'explore les solutions que les théories féministes des sciences et des techniques apportent, pour les mettre à l'épreuve de ma pratique textile.

There is a word game being played throughout Helen Phillips’ debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat. The first instance occurs when Joseph Jones, the protagonist’s husband, notices how the sign for a “Diagnostic Laboratory” reads as “Agnostic Laboratory” when a truck parks partly in front of it. This is the couple’s “favorite kind of coincidence.” In dialogue, their give and take is often interrupted by playful homophones and letter substitutions. When describing the protagonist’s inner life, the narrator frequently disturbs the flow of her thoughts with strings of anagrams. Phillips and her characters seem determined to defuse particular words and phrases by dismantling their meanings.

La capacidad de la ciencia ficción para convocar las inquietudes colectivas más inconscientes y reprimidas es proporcional a su propia inventiva auto-regeneradora. Interstellar (2014) de Christopher Nolan profundiza algunos temas de la ciencia y la filosofía a lo largo de la historia para el disfrute de la audiencia en un drama galáctico de proporciones épicas. Este ensayo esboza algunas reflexiones sobre el cine de Nolan y sobre Interstellar como una película con multitud de perspectivas filosóficas y políticas en nuestro confuso tiempo histórico. Del mismo modo, trata de rebatir algunas de las críticas lanzadas sobre la película, entre ellas, la principal, de ser otro producto americano de carácter antropocéntrico.

Drawing on feminist theory, this paper uses a feminist lens to analyze the gendered representations and discourses of artificial intelligence in cinema history. In particular, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the representations of female robots and AI in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2013).

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

Victor Frankenstein fails in his profession because he consistently contravenes three basic tenets of scientific community: observation, repetition, and transparency. Critics of Frankenstein have generally failed to recognize the socially responsible scientific values that Shelley attempts to define through the character of the creature. This article argues that Shelley's novel puts forward the idea of socially responsible science: cooperative forms of experimentation that reimagine the scientist's materials and instruments as agents, involve multiple points of view, and pursue mutually beneficial discoveries. Shelley depicts the creature's trial-and-error tests as the natural and instinctual antithesis of Victor's unnatural and artificial laboratory work; the creature's empiricism satisfies needs and solves specific human problems. Shelley's farsighted fiction promotes this vision in an age when the scientific revolution had made science truly popular. Her fictional experiments with the idea of socially responsible science enable us to read Frankenstein as a work of science fiction that offers both a utopian ethic of intellectual partnership and a critique of singular science. If Shelley's vision of a more open and reflective scientific community aspired to a potentially impossible ideal, it is one toward which she thought her age should aspire.

In 1905 the writer, educator and reformist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana's Dream, a fictional short story discussing the dream realm Ladyland, where women built and ruled a utopian society while men lived in seclusion. In previous discussions of science fiction tropes within the text, scholars have assumed that the essentialised concepts of gender and science presented by Rokeya are the product of a comparative discourse of feminist science fiction texts, which responded to global issues of scientific, technological and ideological modernity. By drawing connections between ideas from such a broad literary discourse, previous approaches have displaced the significance of the individual text as a source from 20 th century India, failing to recognise that the tropes and methods of science fiction deployed in Sultana's Dream were the product Rokeya's owns needs in the construction of a feminist argument. This essay will argue that the act of writing science fiction needs to be recognised as an act of resistance. I propose that Rokeya deploys the tropes of dreaming, history and modernity in order to argue that gender norms are constructions, the nature and impact of which are dependent upon the relative context and the balance of social, economic and technological power between genders. To demonstrate this, I shall first outline the limits of previous approaches, before conducting an analysis of how inversion, juxtaposition and subversion are important aspects defining feminist science fiction as resistance.

Feminist dystopia is not isolated from or even antagonistic to the dystopian tradition at large: The history, development and characteristics of feminist dystopianism draw from feminist theory and social critique but also from the ways in which the literary utopia and dystopia have articulated cultural hopes and fears grounded in a critical as- sessment of the present moment. The concept ‘feminism’ as used in dystopian/utopian studies is usually implicitly understood to refer to a critique of social structures or cul- tural patterns that have disadvantaged women. Yet feminism has never been a coherent movement and has changed considerably since the first known critical engagements with the so-called woman question. Feminist dystopia is thus best studied as a nodal point that intersects with dystopian science fiction, feminist theory, and particularly feminist utopian writing.
Feminist speculation about a better world goes back to the earliest examples of uto- pian writing with texts such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1404/05; cf. Johns 2010: 174). Feminist dystopia emerged in the 1970s from this tradi- tion by importing key elements of the literary dystopia, such as the focus on and exten- sion of repressive structures in the present and the satirical critique of these structures. However, since both classical utopia and dystopia have traditionally been affirmative of gender hierarchies, the feminist dystopia also includes a critique of the genre itself.
My exploration of feminist dystopia in this chapter focuses on its initiating mo- ment in the 1970s. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time have usually been read as examples of feminist utopian writing (with the notable exception of Booker and Thomas 2009), even though they are, like most femi- nist utopian writing in the 1970s utopian only in part, as Angelika Bammer argued in Partial Visions. I argue here that these two novels can be seen as prototypical feminist dystopian texts in the 1970s, constituting the beginnings of feminist dystopianism in the midst of the utopian renaissance. As such, the two novels have a lot in common: Both present the basic narrative world as dystopia for women; both include a partial utopia and its dystopian nemesis; both show that this utopia is only one of many possi- ble futures that depends on individual and collective action taken in the present mo- ment; and, finally, both novels are grounded in a powerful sense of utopian hope, while also expressing profound pessimism. The way in which these two novels incor- porate and mix science fiction, dystopia, utopia, and realist fiction, deploying the inter- relations and tensions between these genre traditions, undermines the rationalism and transparent storytelling practices of all of these traditions. In the wake of the complex critique articulated in these novels, the 1980s and 1990s produced a number of femi- nist dystopias that responded to cultural transformations by giving the dystopian ele- ment a more prominent presence. However, the paradigm established by Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy has continued to be productive in feminist fictions of the future.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and The Heart Goes Last use genre to explore the risks and opportunities associated with gender’s intersection with technology and culture in 21st century Western society. Atwood’s generic model, the ustopia, combines utopian and dystopian paradigms. This enables an in-depth consideration of how gendered inequality functions, whilst maintaining the ability to represent utopian possibility. I investigate how Atwood’s representation of gender is politicised through the oppositional writing practices of speculation and indeterminacy as well as through her ustopian structure and use of intertext. I suggest Atwood’s metafictional portrayal of gender makes an important contribution to the literary dystopia and science fiction, helping to keep the genre’s critique of society fully, rather than partially, dynamic. The gendered hierarchy in her ustopias is constructed and maintained through language. I theorise my analysis of this through reference to Lacanian theory.

An inquiry into onto-epistemology, this essay investigates the reciprocal production of aesthesis and empiricism, both the seemingly scientific and the perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise under conditions of imperial Western humanism. In a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), I argue that as an enabling condition of imperial Western humanism, the black mater(nal) is foreclosed by the dialectics of hegemonic common sense and that the anxieties stimulated by related signifiers, such as the black(ened) maternal image, voice, and lifeworld, allude to the latent symbolic-material capacities of the black mater(nal), as mater, as matter, to destabilize or even rupture the reigning order of representation that grounds the thought-world relation. In other words, the specter of the black mater(nal)—that is, nonrepresentability—haunts the terms and operations tasked with adjudicating the thought-world correlate or the proper perception of “the world” such as hierarchical distinctions between reality and illusion, Reason and its absence, subject and object, science and fiction, and speculation and realism, which turn on attendant aporias pertaining to immanence and transcendence. Exploring the mind-body-social nexus in Hopkinson’s fiction, I contend that in Brown Girl vertigo is evoked as both a symptom and a metaphor of inhabiting a reality discredited (a blackened reality) that is at once the experience of the carceral and the apprehension of a radically redistributed sensorium. I argue the black mater(nal) holds the potential to transform the terms of reality and feeling, therefore rewriting the conditions of possibility of the empirical.

The origins of science fiction are most often thought to trace to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, a story born from a night of spooky tale-telling by the fireside that explores scientific, moral, and ethical questions that were of great concern in the 19th century—and that continue to resonate today. And, although novels and short stories built the foundations of science fiction, film and television have emerged as equally powerful, experimental, and enjoyable ways to experience the genre. Even as far back as the silent era, films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis have used science fiction to tell stories that explore many facets of human experience.

In Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy David Kyle Johnson of King’s College takes you on a 24-lecture exploration of the final frontiers of philosophy across several decades of science fiction in film and television. From big-budget blockbusters to television series featuring aliens in rubber masks, Professor Johnson finds food for philosophical thought in a wide range of stories. By looking at serious questions through astonishing tales and astounding technologies, you will see how science fiction allows us to consider immense, vital—and sometimes controversial—ideas with a rare combination of engagement and critical distance.

The Future Is Now

Science fiction is often concerned with the future, being used not only as a tool of prediction—humans are notoriously bad at accurately predicting the future—but also as one of extrapolation and interrogation. Rather than simply asking what the future will look like, the futuristic visions of sci-fi TV, like Star Trek, Firefly, and even the animated comedy Futurama, offer compelling statements about humanity’s hopes, dreams, and fears. We can, therefore, use fictionalized futures to better understand today’s world.

Setting a story in the future—or in an alternate reality, or on a faraway planet—also allows sci-fi creators to open up the realm of possibility beyond what our current world offers, while also looking at very real scientific possibilities. As you look at sci-fi films like Arrival and Interstellar, Professor Johnson highlights the kinds of issues worth considering if contact with extraterrestrial life or time travel became part of our real-life experience. And even if these experiences remain in the realm of fiction, considering them still provides insight into important philosophical questions. Indeed, throughout the lectures of Sci-Phi, you will ponder many questions that have concerned philosophers for centuries, including:

Do humans truly have free will?
Could machines one day be conscious? Or be sentient?
Could we actually be living in a simulated world?
How will humanity confront a future of diminished resources and advancing technology?
Are science and religion compatible?
When, if ever, is war justified?
How do we know what information to trust and what to dismiss?
Exploring Reality through Fiction

Staples of science fiction like time travel, alternate universes, and extraterrestrial life are endlessly fascinating ideas to explore. Yet, despite the insights they can give us, they may not seem very relevant to everyday life. Even our conception of reality—what is real and what isn’t—can have little bearing on the more mundane aspects of living from day to day. But science fiction, for all its futurism and outlandish flourishes, is not limited to these theoretical concepts; it is also a window into crucial discussions about the here and now, questions concerning ethics, power, religion, tolerance, social justice, politics, and the many practical dimensions of living in a world that is constantly changing and forever presenting humans with fresh new dilemmas to solve. And by removing us from reality, sci-fi can also remove our biases and make us see such issues anew.

Indeed, as Professor Johnson makes clear, stories of simulated worlds and artificial intelligence can seem far-fetched, but they actually offer valuable insights into social and ethical issues that may be more immediate and relevant than they first appear. By looking at them through fiction, we can take a step back and get a clearer picture of the larger implications. For instance, by looking at characters like Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, we are forced to wonder: If we create artificial intelligence that achieves true sentience, how will we treat these man-made beings? Will we repeat the sins of the past by enslaving them or will we embrace them as our equals? If we are ever able to re-create a convincing version of the world via computers, as films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor suggest, do the lives lived in those simulations mean less than those in the “real” world? The answers to these questions—and many others—speak volumes about human values and, given our ever-evolving technology, may require answers sooner rather than later.

You may be surprised to see how often a science fiction story can “trick” you into thinking about questions and concepts you may have never considered. Shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror overtly present questions and issues for audiences to ponder. However, while other films and television shows may seem to focus more on the adventure and entertainment value of science fiction, they still often have deep philosophical dimensions. Consider the long-running British TV series Doctor Who. A beloved icon of science fiction, the show has always been framed as simply the exciting weekly adventures of a time-traveling alien; yet, throughout its decades on television, it has explored issues of autonomy, sentience, pacifism, colonialism, racism, grief, morality, and much more.

A Unique View of Philosophy

While each lecture of Sci-Phi focuses on a few key films or television episodes, you will also explore dozens of other movies and TV episodes along the way. Likewise, each philosophical concept you explore opens the door to further discovery. Throughout the lectures, you will be introduced to the ideas of great thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Turing, Baudrillard, and many others; and through these ideas, you will better understand the different ways philosophy examines the big questions, from metaphysics and epistemology to existentialism and ethics.

Fans of the genre will find their experience of sci-fi stories enriched by layers of philosophical inquiry that reveal each story to be much more than just entertainment. Similarly, those who are looking for a thrilling and accessible introduction to philosophy will be equally rewarded by Professor Johnson’s breadth of knowledge, as well as his deep and abiding love for both science fiction storytelling and philosophical exploration. As you engage with philosophy by way of sci-fi stories for screens both large and small, it is important to keep in mind that Professor Johnson will not shy away from revealing key plot points in many of the stories he explores throughout the lectures; so, although it is not required, watching the films and TV episodes at the heart of each lecture is recommended. Presented as a one-on-one conversation and enlivened by fun visual references to many of the stories you will encounter, Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy is a philosophy course unlike any other.

Whether telling stories of far-flung futures or investigating the here and now, science fiction is an invaluable source of intellectual and imaginative exploration. From the genre-defining classics like Star Wars, Doctor Who, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Twilight Zone to a new wave of speculative tales like Transcendence, Snowpiercer, Westworld, and The Hunger Games, sci-fi stories offer a uniquely engaging and incisive way to ask serious questions about the world we live in, even when those stories are set in a galaxy far, far away. Philosophy is the search for truth. Sometimes that truth is best revealed through fiction.

Lecture 1 : Inception and The Interpreation of Art
Lecture 2 : The Matrix and the Value of Knowledge
Lecture 3 : The Matrix Sequels and Human Freewill
Lecture 4 : The Adjustment Bureau, the Force, and Fate
Lecture 5 : Contact: Science vs. Religion
Lecture 6 : Arrival: Aliens and Radical Translation
Lecture 7 : Interstellar: Is Time Travel Possible?
Lecture 8 : Futurama, Doctor Who and Temporal Paradoxes
Lecture 9 : Star Trek TNG and Alternate Worlds
Lecture 10 : Dark City, Dollhouse, and Personal Identity
Lecture 11 : Westworld and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Lecture 12 : Transcendence and the Dangers of AI
Lecture 13 : The Thirteenth Floor: Are We Simulated?
Lecture 14 : The Orville, Orwell, and the "Black Mirror"
Lecture 15 : Star Wars: Good vs. Evil
Lecture 16 : Firefly, Blake's 7 and Political Rebellion
Lecture 17 : Starship Troopers, The Doctor, and Just War
Lecture 18 : The Prime Directive and Postcolonialism
Lecture 19 : Capitalism in Metropolis, Elysium, and Panem
Lecture 20 : Snowpiercer and Climate Change
Lecture 21 : Soylent Green: Overpopulation and Euthanasia
Lecture 22 : Gattaca and the Ethics of Reproduction
Lecture 23 : The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminism and Religion
Lecture 24 : Kubrick's 2001 and Nietzsche’s Übermensch

Most Americans would describe Japanese science fiction with one word: Godzilla. However, true fans of the genre know that for decades, Japan has been turning out some of the most innovative stories ever published. Unfortunately, those that make it into English are often difficult to find. The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories brings together the most outstanding short stories of this body of literature. Included here are thirteen stories, by both the "big three" of Japanese science fiction, Shinichi Hoshi, Ryo Hanmura, and Sako Komatsu and by the likes of Kobo Abe and Morio Kita, writers of mainstream fiction who occasionally delve into sci-fi.(GoodReads.com)

John L. Apostolou (Editor)
Martin H. Greenberg (Editor)
Sara Pourhassani (Persian Translator)

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اغلب آمریکایی‌ها ژانر علمی تخیلی ژاپنی را با یک کلمه توصیف می‌کنند: گودزیلا. هرچند طرفداران واقعی این ژانر می‌دانند که ژاپن دهه‌هاست تعدادی از خلاقانه‌ترین داستان‌هایی که تا کنون به چاپ رسیده‌ را تولید کرده است. متأسفانه دست‌رسی به داستان‌هایی که به انگلیسی ترجمه شده‌اند اغلب بسیار دشوار است. کتاب "بهترین داستان‌های علمی تخیلی ژاپنی" تعدادی از برجسته‌ترین داستان‌ کوتاه‌های این پیکره‌ از ادبیات را گرد هم آورده است. در این کتاب سیزده داستان هم از سه نویسنده‌ی بزرگ ژانر علمی تخیلی ژاپنی یعنی شین‌ایچی هوشی، ریو هان‌مورا و ساکیو کوماتسو، و نیز داستان‌هایی از کوبو آبه و موریو کیتا که نویسندگان جریان اصلی ادبیات ژاپن هستند و گاه به کاوش در ژانر علمی تخیلی پرداخته‌اند آورده شده است.

Książka "Narracje fantastyczne" pod wspólną redakcją Kseni Olkusz i Krzysztofa M. Ma­ja jest piątym tomem serii „Perspektywy Ponowoczesności”, zbierającym na blis­ko siedmiuset stronach trzydzieści tekstów nau­kowych rozpatrujących szeroko po­jętą fantastykę z perspektywy ponowoczesnej, trans­dyscyplinarnej i światocentrycz­nej zarazem *** Z recenzji prof. dr hab. Anny Łebkowskiej (Uniwersytet Jagielloński):
Tom "Narracje fantastyczne" to zbiór studiów poświęconych ważnym współczesnym zjawiskom obecnym w literaturze, filmie, grach komputerowych i szeroko rozumianym świecie kultury. Wśród jego wielu zalet wymienić należy na pierwszym miejscu opracowanie mocnych podstaw teore­tycznych. Autorzy podważają paradygmat tekstocentryczny i opisują zjawisko zwrotu światocen­trycznego, przekonująco je udokumentowując. Przedstawione w tomie studia pozwalają nie tylko usytuować współczesne narracje fantastyczne na tle przemian światopoglą­dowych, teorii filozofi­cznych i kulturowych, ale zarazem ukazać ich wyraźne powiązania z namy­słem nad ponowocze­snością. Książka zaleca się także – między innymi – ważnymi głosami na te­mat sporów wokół współczesnego kanonu fantastyki, rozważaniami poświęconymi figurze cybor­ga w świetle teorii posthumanistycznych czy zagadnieniu transfikcjonalności. Zgodnie z przyjętą ramą światocen­tryczną w osobnej części tomu znajdziemy studia na temat przestrzeni: głównie miasta i społe­czeństwa, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem problemu utopii, a także rozprawy, któ­rych autorzy skoncentrowali się na kwestiach temporalnych (tu m.in. historie alternatywne). Roz­ległe spektrum badanych problemów dopełnione zostało przez – poparte gruntownymi analizami – interpretacje zjawisk obecnych w wielu mediach. Należy z całym przekonaniem stwierdzić, że tom oddawany do rąk czytelnika stanowi cenną inicjatywę badawczą.

Cryonics denotes research into and the practice of deep-freezing dead bodies for resuscitation in a technologically advanced future. This article discusses the technoscientific practice and rationality of cryonics, focusing on two aspects in particular: the ways in which conceptions of life and death and their relation are being reconfigured, and the cryonic understanding of personality and its relation to the body. It complements the range of topics discussed in the literature on cryonics by adopting a feminist perspective and placing particular emphasis on the importance of taking into consideration the materiality, processuality and relationality of life and death in the cryonic imaginary. The analysis draws on Rosi Braidotti's adaptation of the conceptual pair of bios and zoe in order to demonstrate that cryonics is premised on the humanist separation of the human as a purely cultural being from 'Nature' as his materially determined other(s). The article argues that cryonics seeks to preserve not only individual lives, but also the increasingly challenged humanist conception of human life as exceptional, self-contained and independent of Nature. The notion of dezoefication is introduced to encapsulate the desire to disentangle the human from (his) nature. Finally, the analysis is complemented with Donna Haraway's approach to a relational ontology, which emphasizes the vulnerability that is associated with relationality. It thus accounts for the humanist bias against relationality and the fear of death as 'becoming other', which are considered to be constitutive of techno-utopian projects such as cryonics.

Nas regiões temperadas e tropicais nas quais parece que os hominídeos evoluíram em seres humanos, a principal comida da espécie eram vegetais. 65 a 80% do que os seres humanos comiam naquelas regiões nos períodos paleolítico, neolítico e pré-histórico foi coletado; somente no extremo do ártico a carne era o alimento básico. Os caçadores de mamutes ocupam espetacularmente as paredes das cavernas e o imaginário, mas o que nós realmente fazíamos para sobreviver e engordar era colher sementes, raízes, brotos, plantas, folhas, nozes, bagas, frutas e grãos, além de insetos e moluscos e capturar pássaros com redes e armadilhas. Peixes, ratos, coelhos e outros pequenos animais eram para aumentar a proteína. E nós nem nos esforçamos para isso-muito mais fácil do que camponeses

Octavia Butler’s 1988 novel, ​Dawn,​ and Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel, ​The Lathe of Heaven,​ each present human-alien relationships that disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies by inserting themselves their nonhuman selves into human social spaces (both as agents and byproducts of manmade change). While most discussions of SF aliens focus on physical appearance, the estranging ‘alien-ness’ in both texts come from the aliens’ use of species-specific languages in the form of chemical exchanges and machine-produced translations.

“Anna Bedford’s piece on the MaddAddam series, ‘Survival in the Post-Apocalypse’, argues that Atwood’s contribution to apocalypse literature is her modern ecofeminism, which holds that capitalism (one of the main contributors to the apocalypse in the series) exploits the most marginalised and powerless, including the poor, women and nature itself.” – Karma Waltonen, Intro

This article explores the ways in which the TV series Westworld blurs gender and genre, creating resonances that deconstruct traditional notions of gender roles. Through a minute analysis of several key scenes in the first season, it examines how robots and humans construct gender both within the park and without, and then explores the question of masculine hegemony and feminine agency within those worlds. Finally, the article undertakes to point out how production and reception interact to create intertextual frameworks that can shed light on questions of gender construction.

Özet
Toplumsal cinsiyet, bireyleri kadın ve erkek olarak ikili kategoriler içinde belirli konumlara yerleştirir ve onları bu şekilde sınırlandırır. Toplumsal cinsiyet örüntüsüyle sarmalanan birey, bu konumdan farklı davranamaz ve kendini sürekli cinsiyetçi tavrın hedefinde bulur. Nietzsche’nin üstinsan öğretisi toplumun insana dayattığı cinsiyet gibi çeşitli olguların bağlarından insanların kendilerini soyutlamasını ve bunları aşmalarını anlatır. Bu çalışma Nietzsche’nin üstinsan öğretisini Automata filmi örnekleminde ve toplumsal cinsiyet bağlamında incelemiştir. Automata filmini üstinsan öğretisi ile beraber çözümlemek ve üstinsanın toplumsal cinsiyetin ötesinde bir topluma geçişini filmdeki çeşitli metaforlarla çözümlemek bu çalışmanın kapsamını oluşturur. Filmdeki otomatların kendilerini başkalaştırarak insanların hizmetinden çıkmaları ve kendilerine ait yeni bir düzen kurma çabaları ile Nietzsche’nin insanın kendini aşarak üstinsan mertebesine ulaşma teorisi birlikte düşünülmüştür. Nietzsche’nin üstinsan öğretisinin bu filme uyarlanmasının sebebi filmin taşıdığı mesajın üstinsan öğretisiyle uyuşmasıdır. Bu mesaj, modern insanın içinde bulunduğu sınırlardan cinsiyetsiz, bambaşka bir kimlikle çıkıp tüm değerleri alt üst ederek toplumsal cinsiyet sınırlarının ötesine geçmesidir. Bu Nietzsche’nin üstinsan olarak tanımladığı insanın kendini toplumun değerlerinden arındırarak kendi özüne dönmesiyle özdeşleştirilmiştir. Filmin Nietzsche felsefesi ile çözümlenmesinde betimsel çözümleme yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Filmdeki karakterler ve metaforlar Nietzsche felsefiyle uyumlu bir şekilde çözümlenerek betimsel bir çalışma yapılmıştır. Çalışmanın amacı Automata filmi örnekleminde cinsiyetçi sınırlardan kurtulan insanın filmdeki otomatlar gibi Nietzsche’nin üstinsan mertebesine ulaşabileceğini, kendi içinde ve toplumda özgürleşebileceğini ortaya koymaktır. Otomatların da dişilik ve erkeksilik cinsiyet özelliklerine göre üretildiği fakat onların insanlardan ve insani özelliklerden ırak bir düzen oluşturma ve bağımsızlaşma istekleri çalışmanın genel çerçevesini oluşturmaktadır. Bu çerçevede filmdeki otomatlar günümüzün modern insanına benzetilmiştir. Gerçekleştirilen üstinsan olarak kabul edilen otomatlar, toplumsal cinsiyet sınırlarından kurtularak, kendini özgür hissederek ve gerçek bir varlık özü edinerek kelimenin tam anlamıyla demoralize edilmiş toplumsal cinsiyet bağlamından uzaktır.

The 1980s in the United States are now understood as years of widespread cultural and ideological fracture. Neoliberalism became the nation's economic mantra, détente was jettisoned in favor of military build-up, and conservative backlash movements surfaced to counter the feminist gains of previous decades. These and other developments materialized out of a multitude of conflicts, a crisis of ideas, words, and practices competing to maintain or rework the nation's defining structures.

This paper argues that technology played a central role in the decade's discordant years, both materially and ideologically, and that certain works of feminist science fiction-particularly by Lois McMaster Bujold, who is the focus here, but also Sheri S. Tepper, Octavia E. Butler, Joan Slonczewski, and others-imagined new structures and practices embedded within the confines of modern technoculture. By doing so, they avoided a prevailing dichotomy conceptualized by Carol Stabile: either technomania, a headlong, manic rush into all things technological, or technophobia, a retreat from such things into a romanticized and idyllic past. Situated between mania and phobia, these works imagined alternatives to the kind of binary thinking that dominates our political climate, as well as visions of what a radically reformed-but also deeply technological-society could look like.

No presente ensaio pretendo colocar em questão a noção de Luce Irigaray da diferença sexual. Procuro investigar a genealogia do pensamento da autora, pensando suas conexões com a filosofia da diferença e com a psicanálise. É um exercício de malabarismo entre a filosofia da diferença sexual e as críticas partidas de lugares de fala não hetero. São várias perguntas que orientam essa reflexão, uma delas é se a diferença sexual está a serviço de uma heteronorma, outra (ligada a essa) é se é possível falarmos/pensarmos/agirmos politicamente a partir de uma comunidade de mulheres, outra ainda é se o essencialismo representa um risco para o feminismo. Todas essas perguntas servem para entendermos melhor o que é a diferença sexual para Irigaray. Penso que a idéia de diferença sexual pode ser interessante para o momento atual do feminismo no qual muitas alianças estão quebradas, porque a diferença sexual é sobre fazer comunidade na casa da diferença, apela para essa necessidade de re- estabelecermos solidariedade feminista entre mulheres. Penso também que é interessante porque abre a categoria mulheres para uma futuridade: o feminino não está dado, tem que ser construído coletivamente, se queremos superar o falogocentrismo. Aposto na radicalidade dessa categoria, porém penso que devemos investigar seus limites.

ABSTRACT:
This article exercise is a science fiction of sociology literature. It in an attempt to identify and analyses the connections between a literary science fiction and its social context is sociology. Sociologists of literature have previously most interested in science fictions which they have assumed to be mimetic, or in some way reflective of social reality. All literature is characterized by the elements of the social world which it reproduces and to which it lends most emphasis. Even when literature can be said to hold to the contemporary world it is a distorting and one that may distort in a number of different ways. This poses problems for the sociologist who wishes to use literature and a source of data regarding the social environments of the past and present, but it also provides the questions which first engage the attention of the sociologist who wants to explain how literature comes to be the kind of thing it is and how it comes to take the kind of forms it does.

Abtract: Speculative fiction has always provided a suitable ground for contesting social constructions such as strict gender roles and conventional views on sexuality. In the 1970s especially, with the influence of second wave feminism, speculative fiction authors began to depict the political struggle of women in fictional universes which presented alternative modes of subjectivity and social structures. Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) make use of the historically-situated nature of speculative fiction to narrate their experiences, reflect personal as well as political struggles in fictional alternate and future worlds which are indeed reflections of the here and now. Both Lessing and Russ combine autobiographical and fictional elements in their exploration of female subjectivity and experience. This preference leads to a more genuine, less generalized impression of female identity and solidarity. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, described as “an attempt at autobiography” by its author, Lessing integrates personal experiences from her own life into the text while exploring a post-apocalyptic, or more precisely, a post-“Crisis” world. Although the events take place in a fictional future, they are influenced by the author’s past in real life. Similarly, in The Female Man, Russ adds autobiographical elements into the text, especially her experiences as a lesbian feminist and her struggle to exist in male-dominated environments. FM presents four different alternate narratives, two of which take place in the future (one is a utopia and the other is a dystopia); however, all of them express a different version of women’s, and of course Joanna Russ’, struggle in life. Both FM and Memoirs therefore reflect the multiplicity and plurality of the voices of women, and by employing speculative fiction tropes, they point to diverse ways of confronting oppressive ideologies both collectively and individually.

This essay will explore the authorial process in order to present my hypothesis concerning what was going on in the mind of Ursula K. LeGuin when she wrote The Left Hand of Darkness. It will suggest that at the moment of writing all authors are of two minds joined as lovers in kemmer. This essay will offer an explanation for the way the novel was crafted and offer an explanation of why LeGuin herself in later years sought to distance herself from the choices she had made back then. After publishing The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin was getting criticized for the choices she made in the novel from Feminist critics. The two issues I will consider here are first, the choice of the pronoun 'he' used in the novel to refer to the Gethens.

The new world -El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found…1 I swam to him and lifted him from the rock into the sea and towed his limp body round the coast to the shore of our cave and carried him out of the water. I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.2

What is particularly interesting, then, in American film star Scarlett Johansson?  What does she signify in the context of stardom, gender and idealised whiteness within the science fiction film text? How might her idealised whiteness speak to the trauma at the heart of this subject position? What might her alien(ating) whiteness say about the state of whiteness in contemporary culture?  To answer these related questions, I would like to examine three films, taking each in turn:  Her, in which she plays the A.I. Operating System, Samantha; Under the Skin, in which she plays an unnamed Alien Other who comes to question her own position in the film; and Ghost in the Shell, in which she plays The Major, a Special Ops, human-cyborg hybrid, charged with defending the bio-tech corporation she works for. These films are tightly grouped not only in terms of genre, thematic but release date, allowing this chapter to assess Johansson’s star image and idealized whiteness at a particular moment in her career, and wider cultural life.

For many theorists, both feminist and not, the figure of an archetypal, active female warrior hero has been problematic. Many feminists believe it is gender stereotyping to suggest that women are unable to possess the force of the archetypal warrior hero and that this archetype is ultimately available to both men and women. I briefly define the nature of the archetypal hero and an argument is made for the active female s/hero who possesses the " masculine " powers of the hero and thus allows the archetypal power of the active warrior hero to pass to women. Joseph Campbell's work on the archetypal hero of myth is drawn on extensively. One of genres that allows an exploration of the s/hero is SF. I explore the s/hero in SF, particularly as she is evoked in Joanna Russ's stories, published as short stories first and then collected in 1976 and published as The Adventures of Alyx. The hero is an important archetypal force that appears in myth and literature from all over the world, with his attributes shifting to serve the society that has called him into existence so that we have both Gilgamesh and David standing beside characters like Batman and Spawn. Although this archetypal figure has been gendered male for most of history 1 , an interesting shift has taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: we have been creating an abundance of women heroes, what I refer to as s/heroes. This shift in popular consciousness is largely due to the socio-political gains of feminists. As twentieth and twenty-first century feminisms usher in a powerful criticism of gender codes and the way women and femininity are treated, it follows that those archetypes that give image to the play of dynamic forces in our collective psyche also have to be renegotiated. Because the hero was coded masculine and male in the past, this figure becomes the site of a fascinating, and popular, renegotiation of gender codes and what we, as a twenty-first century society, expect of our heroes. I want to address the following question here: what do we expect of heroes? And can a woman meet those expectations? I contend that we still expect of the warrior hero much what we always have – and that, yes, women can most certainly take up arms in archetypal battle. The process of renegotiating gender codes and rethinking archetypal heroes really begins with twentieth-century SF, particularly with the writing of feminist SF authors like Joanna Russ. A brief consideration of the heroes of feminist SF authors like C.L. Moore, Tanith Lee, C.J. Cherryh and Octavia Butler suggests that the s/hero should be identified in exactly the same way that a male hero is, and we must expect no less of her. It is not the masculinity of the hero that must be revised, but the masculinist interpretation of the archetypal content of the heroic journey. Russ does this with particular deftness, as I show below. In SF, Joanna Russ's Alyx is a perfect example of the archetypal s/hero.