Feminist Science Fiction Research Articles

Creation Stories: Reproductive Crisis and the “Birth / Abortive” of Science Fiction

ABSTRACT This essay develops a genealogy of feminist science fiction as a revisionary reckoning with the enduring influence of patriarchal creation stories. Situating my reading practice in relation to the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, I consider scenes in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Lilith’s Brood in which characters negotiate fraught reproductive choices with acts of speculative story-telling. The allegorical embodiments of reproductive crisis, I argue, are monstrous, inscrutable figures—John Milton’s Chaos, Mary Shelley’s creature, and Octavia Butler’s Oankali-human hybrids—who stand for inherited violence but also the “abortive” potential of reproduction gone awry.

An Analysis of the Significance, Social Relevance and Importance of “Sultana’s Dream” by Begum Rokeya; Then and Now

This analytical paper studies the impact of Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's short narrative Sultana's Dream on traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Born into a traditional Bengali Muslim family, Begum Rokeya shed cultural expectations by advocating for women's education and literacy. Sultana’s Dream, a pioneering feminist science fiction work, satirises patriarchal society by imagining a utopian future with gender roles reversed. Through a critical evaluation of Sultana's Dream, this paper exhibits Rokeya's revolutionary views on gender equality, education, and intellectual empowerment, contrasting her work with contemporary feminist works such as Barbie (2023). The essay emphasises Rokeya's constant struggle for women's liberation and its continued relevance in today’s evolving world.

Toward the Translation Zone of Solidarity and Hospitality Beyond Hate：On the Reception of “K-Literature” in Japan

The 2010s in Japan saw a boom in “hate books” inciting hatred toward Korea and China, along with the spread of hate speech against diverse minority groups and socially vulnerable people. Discrimination and oppression against women and minorities had emerged globally as a serious social issue during this period, as symbolized by the #MeToo movement and the BLM movement. This paper examines the meaning and potential of translation literature against this backdrop of an age of hatred. Since the Japanese translation of Cho Nam-ju’s novel <i>Kim Jiyoung, Born</i> 1982 became a bestseller in 2019, there has been a surge in the translation of Korean literature in Japan, known as the “K-literature” boom. Feminism is an important keyword in the active reception of Korean literature, and translation has mediated women’s solidarity against misogyny. Recently, Japanese readers have gained a great familiarity through magazines and translations with contemporary Korean feminist science fiction, a prominent feature of which is its subversive imagination that seeks symbiotic relationships between women, minorities, and non-human beings. It remains to be seen whether translation literature can build solidarity and hospitality among diverse Others transcending hate.

In the Womb of Utopia: Feminist Science Fiction, Reproductive Technology, and the Future

This article explores the ways in which reproductive technology is used as a literary trope to enable or embody adesired social order in a utopian setting. It discusses Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). In these American classics of feminist science fiction, reproduction is a key element, and they are rooted in a feminist understanding of power that sees the organization of both reproductive and child-care labor as central to analyses of patriarchy, as well as to any attempts to re-imagine patriarchal structures. The analysis draws on critical kinship studies that see the forming of kinship and families as a form of “cultural technology” and which thus opens these relationships to critical examination. It explores how the kind of change reproductive technologies can effect is not a property simply inherent in the technologiesthemselves. Rather, these medical technologies intersect with and become part of pre-existing cultural technologies of family and gender. Finally, the article addresses the question of how feminist futurities or feminist conceptions of time can be mobilized to enable resistance and change.

Space Cowboys and Alien Landscapes

As Star Wars women Rey, Jyn Erso, Ahsoka Tano, and others build on Leia’s legacy, it is also important to celebrate the mid-century science fiction writer who influenced Star Wars earlier on – Leigh Brackett, Queen of Space Opera. Brackett not only wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) before her death, but she also influenced American film and sf in the decades before. She was an accomplished screenwriter when Lucas approached her for The Empire Strikes Back, having written Rio Bravo (1959) and co-written The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner, for example. And her pulps and novels established her as an authority in the science fiction genre, as well. She was the first woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award for The Long Tomorrow (1955), a novel that denounces the toxic violence of militarized science and venerates resistance. Similarly, Brackett’s Shadow Over Mars (1944) condemns authoritarian exploitation and reveres rebellion. These familiar themes, of course, are also in The Empire Strikes Back. While some of her elements did not make it to the final film – the Luke-Leia-Han love triangle and Luke’s Jedi twin Nellith, for instance – her style of frontier anti-authoritarian Space Opera resistance comes through clearly. Resurrecting Brackett’s work on The Empire Strikes Back and analyzing the influence of her earlier work situates the Star Wars saga as a descendant of mid-century feminist sf as we simultaneously celebrate its more inclusive contemporary narratives.

Practicing Palliation for Extinction and Climate Change

AbstractEven with the advent of climate change, mainstream environmentalism lacks a robust death ethics, that is, ethical theories and practices for attending directly to what is owed to the unjustly dead and dying. This article draws on Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and feminist science fiction narratives and their correlating lived practices to explore how death ethics for those driven extinct by climate change and other environmental injustices can and ought to go beyond affect, symbolism, and abstraction. It puts forward environmental palliation as an alternative framework for grappling with the injustice of extinction as and in publics. Far from a glorified form of euthanasia, palliation is an ethic and a practice geared toward providing good or better deaths for particular entities under specific conditions of injustice. In death, palliation cedes to remembrance, an ethic and practice for keeping the dead alive in memory so that they can be cared for. When done right, these death ethics are inextricably linked with climate justice for the living and those yet-to-be.

Reproductive Justice: The Final (Feminist) Frontier

From Gattaca to Star Trek, problematic tropes surrounding reproduction can easily be found in works of mainstream science fiction. Such tropes uphold conservative anxieties around reproductive technologies, abortion, and pregnancy, and these works thus become influential in legal, ethical, and policy discussions on these issues. In contrast, feminist science fiction attempts to expose reproductive injustice, both current and future, through portrayals of prototype social-legal contexts. In this article, I argue that feminist science fiction works are, therefore, of importance for feminist legal theory as they can help us imagine a radically transformed future for reproduction. I consider the work of Octavia Butler and Laura Lam as examples of reproductive dystopia highlighting current, past, and potential future socio-legal injustices. These feminist works call for change grounded in the lived experiences of women and people capable of becoming pregnant.

Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist science fiction: Sideshow and Six Moon Dance by Sheri Tepper

This essay examines the emotions of diverse artificial intelligences envisioned by an incongruous feminist science fiction author, Sheri S. Tepper. The focus of the comparison will be on a complex cyborg, the Questioner in Six Moon Dance and the relevant sentient creatures in Sideshow so as to contrast the representation of emotions felt/expressed by constructs, and try to establish the connection with the author’s world view.

‘It was quiet’: the radical architectures of understatement in feminist science fiction

“Poisonless:a bare city, bright, the colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) This is how Ursula K. Le Guin describes the city of Abbenay in The Dispossessed. It is modest and unassuming. It is quiet. This architectural restraint is jarringly at odds with predominant portrayals of the science fiction city. As noted by Graham (2016) and Hurley (2008) the future city has become synonymous with rapid vertical urbanisation, closing off alternative urban visions and the possible futures they contain. While there is a growing call for the study of sf by scholars in the spatial disciplines such as Abbott (2016), Collie (2011), Hewitt and Graham (2015) and Kitchin and Kneale (2002), the unassuming, everyday spaces of feminist sf are often lost in the shadows cast by the dystopian high rise. As Le Guin argues, these passive and participatory utopias become visible only when we ‘adjust to a dimmer light’ (1989). In response, this paper lingers in shared spaces of sf which are possible examples of what Washida Imarisha terms ‘visionary fiction’ which is sf that ‘has a relevance towards building new, freer worlds’ (2015: 4) including; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). By imaginatively inhabiting the utopian enclaves within these feminist texts it is possible to explore geographies of alterity – to adjust to the dim light and learn to cherish the quiet.

Navigating the 'Darkness': Feminist, Trans, and Queer Comedy Against Ideology

In this article I argue that dark comedy is an important democratic resource for challenging ideology. I build this argument by drawing from two voices—trans YouTube activist Natalie Wynn and feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ. I begin by conducting a close reading of Wynn's video "The Darkness," in which she discusses the hypocrisies of free speech ideology. Critically responding to a transphobic performance by comedian Ricky Gervais, Wynn shows how the language of political correctness and free speech are used to conceal deeper structures of oppression. To think about this problem, I look at Joanna Russ's satirical "How to Suppress Women's Writing," a mock instruction manual for preventing women and people of color from becoming published authors. In this text, Russ theorizes ideology as an organized and escalating progression of responses to anti-hegemonic action. Russ's use of satire to expose these uses of ideology, however, has the effect of undermining their political projects. Drawing insight from this example, I conclude by returning to Wynn's case for the importance of comedy created by marginalized people (she terms this type of comedy "the darkness") as a political tool. While some leftist responses have tended to argue that the medium and structure of comedy facilitates bigotry and erasure, Wynn makes a case for dark comedy as a means of transcending these structures. She shows that dark comedy is an antidote to dominant ideologies, and is a political tool that is more readily available to the oppressed than to their oppressors.

Çeviri eleştirisine sosyolojik gözle bakmak: Karanlığın Sol Eli

Bu çalışmada, Ursula K. Le Guin’in 1969 yılında yayımlanan The Left Hand of Darkness romanının Türkçe çevirisi, Antoine Berman’ın çeviri eleştirisi modeli çerçevesinde, Bourdieucü sosyolojik yaklaşımla ele alınmıştır. Eser, Ümit Altuğ tarafından çevrilmiş ve 1993 yılında Karanlığın Sol Eli başlığı ile Ayrıntı Yayınları tarafından yayımlanmıştır. Çalışmada bu eserin seçilmesinin sebebi, feminist bilimkurgunun ilk örneklerinden olması ve konusuyla dili bakımından Türkçeye çevrilmesinde olası zorlukların bulunmasıdır. Toplumdaki toplumsal cinsiyet algısı dil aracılığıyla kurulur ve yeniden üretilir. Bunun en önemli örneklerinden biri de İngilizcede olduğu gibi bazı dillerde cinsiyetli adılların (he/she/it) bulunmasıdır. Sözkonusu bilimkurgu eseri cinsiyetsiz (androjen) insanların yaşadığı bir gezegende geçmekte ve erkek bir gözlemci tarafından aktarılmaktadır. Toplumsal cinsiyet ve dilin kesişme noktasındaki sorun da burada ortaya çıkar, çünkü Türkçede cinsiyetli adıl yoktur. Bu yüzden eseri Türkçesinden okuyanlar bu eser üzerinden gerçekleştirilen tartışmaları takip edememektedirler. Yayınevi veya çevirmen, dipnot veya önsöz gibi üstmetinsel müdahalelerde bulunmadığı için, erek metinde bu mesele yeterince ön plana çıkamamıştır. Dolayısıyla Berman’ın modeli uyarınca eserin yeniden çevirisinin yapılmasının ve bu çevirinin eserin çok katmanlı yapısı ve yazarın kendine özgü dil ve dünyası göz önünde bulundurularak yapılması gerektiği ortaya çıkmıştır.

Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire

Foreword to Zisl's God, The God of Unmet Desire S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate, Editor Toward the end of these pages, Zisl discloses the functions of tefillah, saying such prayer teaches us to "mourn our brokenness and beg for the divine." Provocatively, Zisl compares prayer to eroticism, as both are practices of yearning and desiring, spurred by awareness of our own incompleteness. These are not activities that stay within designated times and places. Rather, their practice infiltrates all our lives and opens the way for "creative possibilities." I might add to this a third parallel, already implicit throughout Zisl's text, and that is the work of writing. Writing remembers what was, and reveals what might be. Writing gives accounts that bring forth justice. Writing strives for redemption. It weeps and it laughs. Its imperfections abound, and yet within the words we catch fleeting encounters with others that intimate wholeness, holiness. Zisl's text that follows here is tefillah, and we the readers participate (erotically and prayerfully) in mourning and begging, the work of repair and rediscovery, as we assemble our own pasts and futures. It is a creative work of nonfiction, emerging at the interstices of queer theology, Talmudic learning, social justice, and personal memoir. It brings the past to bear on the future, and the future on the past. When Zisl first approached me with their essay, I realized this would be ideal for our journal CrossCurrents, since it checks so many of the boxes that define our publishing output: creative work, engaged with issues of social justice, and rooted in religious tradition. The only problem was that the text was too lengthy to be just another article in our pages, while breaking it up felt like missing the integrity of the whole work. So, we created a special, special issue, something we've never done here at CrossCurrents. We're devoting this entire issue to a single work of a single author. The fact that we can print each journal issue as a stand-alone book made this an opportunity we wanted to take [End Page V] advantage of and we were thrilled when Zisl agreed to work with us on the venture. God, The God of Unmet Desire reflects the deep learning and yearning of its author, interpreting ancient Hebrew liturgy through Black diasporic poetry or feminist science fiction to wrestle with individual and social quests for racial, economic, and gender liberation. Thus, it translates ancient meanings via modern social life. Even so, it remains resolutely traditional. There's an apology in here, an argument for a God, and a relationship with that God who is expansive, who revels in words and wonders, who delights in sex and sensuality, who cares for the oppressed and desires liberation. As I read and re-read Zisl's text during the process of editing, I kept thinking about width, wideness. The text opens and closes with a passage from Psalm 81, "Open wide your mouth . . ." If you close your mouth, you'll miss the honey. So, open wide. I worked through the text, opening myself to something new, attempting to make clear the varieties of voices that emerge and ink-bleed through the white pages. In the process, I had to think about width in a very physical way. How wide are the margins? How much indentation to give a passage? Is a block of text centered? Flush right? Flush left? Do the quotes from others have the same indentation as the author's own voice? How much width should there be in the text and in the margins? Voices vary and, in print, width makes those distinctions clearer. I was reminded of pages of the Talmud in which the mishnah is placed at the center, gemara extending that below, and then Rashi and other commentaries circling and swirling around the center. What a feat of production it must be to produce such a work! So much of it comes down to width: to the ratio of text to other text, as well as the white space surrounding the text. Margins in any book are key because that's where the reader engages, jots notes, queries, or just...

Fantasy States: Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women’s Political Memoirs

This article reads a set of South African women’s political memoirs as both propaganda pieces and fantasy texts. Inspired by Joan W. Scott’s recent explorations of feminist fantasy, the article draws attention to a set of scenes that recur across diverse political memoirs: scenes of interracial physical and domestic intimacy and scenes of collective national voyaging. Reading these depictions as fantasies, this article argues, lets us understand these women memoirists as propagandists for a national liberation cause. In their texts, these women espouse a particular and gendered nationalism that insists on public and private intimacy as a key component of a (fantasized) free South Africa, even as they acknowledge the unease inherent in seeking out these intimacies. This reading disrupts scholarly accounts that have tended to marginalize women as contributors to nationalist discourses, and it enables a deeper analysis of the tensions of race and interracial intimacy that beset the antiapartheid movement.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Rewilding Technology

This paper is rooted in the ecological crisis of our contemporary world. Rather than rejecting educational technology (edtech) as too environmentally damaging to use, it draws on critical utopian approaches, feminist science fiction and conservation projects to suggest ‘rewilding’ as a frame for designing and using edtech with a view to ameliorating technology’s long-term inequitable planetary impact. After briefly describing projects for rewilding nature, the paper turns to the specifics of rewilding edtech. It first highlights pragmatic suggestions for more sustainable edtech practices. It then suggests that the concept of ‘sustainability’ limits current practices, and proposes that a more radical and utopian rewilding can herald an education beyond sustainability. Rewilding edtech prioritises decelerating and degrowth, regenerating and relating, hospicing dying worlds and birthing new possibilities.

Diana, the Challenger: A Feminist Figure of Power and Salvation in Hollywood Feminist Fantasy Wonder Woman (2017)

Jenkins (2017) Wonder Woman is a portrayal of the traditional role of feminism, in which masculine traits including courage, strength, leadership, independence, and assertiveness are used to overwhelm male-dominant society, while manhood as a masculine trait is challenged by a woman constantly striving for power and authority. Marriage is shown as a failed philosophy in the movie, while men are shown just a minimal need to procreate. ‘Wonder Woman’ has an extensive gay male and lesbian fan base. This task approaches Wonder Woman with a semiotic and cultural examination to perceive how her character is comprised of some syntagmas that empower this sort of identification like same-sex society, battling bigotry, discovering one's place, and flourishing in transformation. The analysis shows that the virtue of fighting for peace in Diana has been compromised with the amalgamation of feminists’ radical approach. She has been presented as a female rebellion, while the rightful cause of the caretaker feminists has been degenerated by the amalgamating of bad feminism with good feminism. Keywords: masculine traits, male-dominant society, feminism, syntagmas, same-sex society, female rebellion

As plain as spilt salt: the city as social structure in The Dispossessed

ABSTRACT Set against the soaring skyscrapers of much canonical urban science fiction (sf), the single storey structures of Abbenay in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed might be easily overlooked. But, as this paper argues, the sparse description of this city ‘as plain as spilt salt’ offers a rich and complex vision of architectural possibility. This paper dwells within this moment of description, drawing on personal association alongside architectural and literary theory to consider how this image of a city might cast strange new light on embedded aspects of architectural practice. It explores how the sustained consideration of the built spaces of feminist sf can provide designers with an empathetic appreciation of how the built environment reflects and informs social relations. Salt is modest, Salt is domestic, Salt is refined, Salt is anything but plain, To spill salt is to act.

Ectogenesis and Representations of Future Motherings in Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season

After the boom of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, many such novels have tackled the different sociocultural understandings of gender and sexual reproduction. Conventionally, patriarchal thinking tends to posit a biological explanation for gender inequality: women are supposed to be child bearers and the primary caregivers, whereas men should provide for the family through their work. However, if men could share procreation, would these views change? A recent work of fiction exploring this question from multiple perspectives is Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), a novel that presents a near future in which babies can be grown in artificial wombs that can be carried around. As an analysis of the novel will show, The Growing Season creatively explores the existing tensions among contemporary understandings of motherhood and feminism(s), as well as developments in reproductive biotechnology, through the different perspectives offered by the heterodiegetic third-person narration and multiple focalisation. Ultimately, the voices of the different characters in the novel convey a polyhedral vision of possible future feminist motherhood(s) where ideas of personal freedom and codependency are radically reconceptualised—a rethinking that becomes especially important nowadays, for the biotechnological elements of this fictional dystopia are already a reality.

The power of lists: the Women’s Press science fiction and the making of a genre

ABSTRACT This article traces the development of a prolific area of cultural production: feminist science fiction. Though, in our moment, the subgenre is the focus of popular attention and voracious scholarly discussion, such success was predicated on the concerted effort of cultural activists—authors, fans and publishers. Where scholarship on this generic phenomenon has thus far provided us with a rich understanding of individual texts and authors, as well as the fan and writing communities which sustained it, the role of feminist publishing practice in facilitating this innovative work has not yet been examined. Methodologically, the article contends that the study of publishing offers scholars a new toolkit through which to understand insurgent cultural forms. Through a combination of archival research and oral history interviews, this article will unpack the strategies through which The Women’s Press, a UK feminist publisher, contributed to the emergence of the genre. It shows the discursive means through which workers marketed and edited texts toward their core feminist audience and dedicated science fiction fans. It examines the selection practices involved in constituting the list—recovery, transatlantic reissue, original publication and criticism—which, in turn, acted to define the genre for new audiences.

The Veiled Avengers of Pakistan’s Streaming New Wave

The privatization of Pakistan’s media and television industry over the past two decades, along with the availability of high-speed internet and an easing of censorship, has revolutionized what plays in Pakistani homes. While hopes that this more open environment would encourage a Pakistani new wave have yet to be born out, an episodic series released this summer is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi introduces readers to one of the most exciting voices in the emerging Pakistani film industry, Asim Abbasi, whose über-stylish series Churails (2020−) presents a women’s detective agency that works undercover to obtain justice for the women of Karachi. An extrajudicial feminist fantasy, Churails is remarkably uncensored and unrestrained, and ground-breaking in its exclusive focus on women’s rage.