An examination of sf tropes operating within the feminist theoretical

models through selective texts.

Despite the popular notion of science and technology being

branded as a masculinist space, a vast array of science fiction (sf)
texts explore traditional as well as postmodernist notions of
feminism. The tropes prevalent in the genre of sf concretise the
abstract ideas of feminist models through tools such as
‘defamiliariazation’ that reimagine the experiential realities into
fictional settings and provide a new perspective to examine them
through.

“As feminist theoretical models - abstract constructions of the

subject, of representation, of sexual difference - become fleshed out
in the particularized worlds of the sf imagination, sf articulates and
explores those models through its narrative experiments…”
- Veronica Hollinger, “Feminist Theory And Science Fiction”

The aim of the paper would be to examine the implicit and explicit
ways in which futuristic dialectics operate within the models of
feminist theories.

One of the earliest examples of a dialectical examination of gender

and biological sex can be seen in C L Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’
(1944). ‘No Woman Born’ has a protagonist whose main conflict lies in
the juxtaposition of a natural body against a techno-body. The text
questions the distinction between being a woman and performing
femininity, as posited by theorist Judith Butler.

James Tiptree, Jr’s ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ depicts an

all-female future society where male astronauts that arrive have to
be put down to maintain its peace and equilibrium: “But the fighting
is long over. It ended when you did, I believe.” These feminist utopias
reveal the authors’ views on what is wrong with the society as it exists
and how eradicating gender-based oppression would mean
recreating the most fundamental aspects of the human culture.
Similarly, the award-winning work The Left Hand of Darkness (1979) is
another feminist utopia in which the author, Ursula K. Le Guin,
imagines a world where the inhabitants are ambisexual humans.
Through beings that are devoid of fixed gender and sexuality, Le
Guin studies the impact of these on human culture. Another example
of an sf text that explores gender indeterminacy is Bone Dance (1991)
by Emma Bull. The protagonist, Sparrow, is a genetically engineered
cheval having a neutral body which can be perceived as either male
or female. Their breakdown of rigid gender norms parallels the
concerns of feminist theory.

An analysis of these texts through the lens of theoretical works of

critics like Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles merits further
exploration in the field. Haraway, in her seminal text, “A Cyborg
Manifesto” conceptualises posthumanist feminism, and delves into
the question of how technological advancements shape the lives of
women. Haraway’s text also rejects “antagonistic dualisms” of
human/machine, nature/culture, male/female, which would be
interesting to compare against these works of sf.

Few writers and critics have touched upon the sensitivity and the
correlation of these themes together and I hope that in my PhD
thesis project I’d be able to discuss this at length.