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.

List of contents

Part One, What: Gender and Genre

1. "Introduction: A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the Science Fiction Anthology"
   Lisa Yaszek


2. "Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction"
   Ida Yoshinaga
Part Two, How: Theoretical Approaches


3. "Introduction to How: Theoretical Approaches"
   Lisa Yaszek


4. "Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid's Tale"
   Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint


5. "Beyond Survival: Climate Change and Reproduction in The Handmaid's Tale, Birthstones, and The Fifth Season"
   Anna Bedford


6. "Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many"
   Beyond Gender Research Collective


7. "Queer SF"
   Ritch Calvin


8. "Renovating the System: The Matrix Resurrections and Trans Resistance to Neoliberal Integration"
   Terra Gasque


9. "Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish: Feminisms and Animal Studies in Science Fiction"
   Joan Gordon


10. "Asexual and Genderless Futures"
    Anna Kurowicka


11. "Making the End Times Great Again: Post-Apocalypses, Preppers, and the Politics of Patriarchy on American Television"
    Carlen Lavigne


12. "Decoding Masculinity in 21st Century Science Fiction by Men: Two Case Studies in Reconceptualizing Patriarchy"
    Sara Martín


13. "I Came for the 'Pew-Pew Space Battles'; I Stayed for the Autism": Martha Wells' Murderbot"
    Robin Reid


14. "The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Alexis Pauline Gumbs's 'Evidence'"
    R. Nicole Smith


15. "Feminist Science Fiction Art"
    Smin Smith
Part Three, Who: Subjectivities


16. "Introduction"
    Wendy Gay Pearson


17. "All Hail the Trans Cyborg" Autonomous as an Analogy of Trans Becoming"
    Jacob Barry


18. "Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency"
    Peyton Campbell


19. "Like 'A Bolt Out of the Blue': Stories of Gender Transformation from the GDR"
    Carol Anne Costabile-Heming


20. "New Pronouns and New Uses: Gender Variance and Language in Contemporary Science Fiction"
    Misha Grifka Wander


21. "Not Just Boys and Toys: Gender and Intersectionality in SF for Children"
    Emily Midkiff


22. "Speculations against Gender Discrimination: A Study of the Indian Speculative Fiction's Growing Engagement with Gender Issues"
    Debaditya Mukhopadhyay


23. "Feminist Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk's Hetero-Masculinism"
    Graham J. Murphy


24. "Trans without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship between Transness and Sex Change 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


26. "Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe: Explorations of Traditional Chinese Gender Roles in Chi Hui's 'Nest of Insects'"
    Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker


27. "Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Portrayals of Sex and Desire in the Speculative Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo Hopkinson"
    Sara Wenger
Part Four, Where: Media and Transmedialities


28. "Introduction"
    Keren Omry


29. "Representation and Performance of Gender in Science Fiction Video Games and Game Mods"
    Pawe¿ 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"


32. Rebecca J. Holden


33. "Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappines"
    Susan Knabe


34. "Afro-feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction"
    Nedine Moonsamy


35. "Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club"
    Jaime Oliveros García and Alejandro López Lizana


36. "The Queer Non Sequitur"
    Alex Prong


37. "Gender and Sexuality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its Adaptations"
    John Rieder


38. "Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent Mexican Films"
    Itala Schmelz


39. "A young, Black, queer woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monáe and sci-fi queerness"
    Erik Steinskog


40. "Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture"
    Dagmar Van Engen


41. "Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time Travelling Girl"
    Candice Wilson and Tobias Wilson-Bates
Part Five, When: Transtemporalities


42. "Introduction"
    Sonja Fritzsche


43. "Naomi Alderman's The Power and New Feminist Science Fiction Superheroes"
    Marlene S. Barr


44. "Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia"
    Laura Collier and Kathryn Prince


45. "Science? Fiction? SF by Women in the Magazines"
    Jane Donawerth


46. "Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction"
    M. Gulia Fabi


47. "Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave"
    Szilvia Gellai


48. "The Role of Historical Amnesia and Restorative Nostalgia in The Handmaid¿s Tale Protests: The Limits of the Contemporary White Feminist Dystopian Imagination"
    Kate Meakin


49. "Tracing Second-Wave Feminism through Women in the Dune Series"
    Kara Kennedy


50. "Complicating the Super Man: Evolving Masculinities in US-American Science Fiction"
    Michael Pitts


51. "Between Stove and Emancipation-Conservative Women and Anti-Utopian Imaginations in Early German Science Fiction"
    Katharina Scheerer


52. "'Mistress of a World': Margaret Cavendish, Gender, & Science Fiction in Early Modern England"
    E. Mariah Spencer


53. "A Riddle about a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity, and Misrecognition in Adam Robert's Bête"
    Jessica Stokes


54. "The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century"
    Mengtian Sun

About the author

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).

Summary

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, especially—but not exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world.

Product details

• Authors: Lisa (Georgia Tech Yaszek
• Assisted by: Sonja Fritzsche (Editor), Fritzsche Sonja (Editor), Wendy Gay Pearson (Editor), Keren Omry (Editor), Omry Keren (Editor), Lisa Yaszek (Editor)
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.02.2023
• EAN: 9780367537012
• ISBN: 978-0-367-53701-2
• No. of pages: 440
• Series: Routledge Companions to Gender
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Society; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Media Studies, Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Gender studies, gender groups, Gay & Lesbian studies, Literature: history and criticism, LGBTQ+ Studies / topics