Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought“An incisive critical work” that looks at Octavia Butler’s writing, the movies of the Matrix and Alien series—and more—through a feminist lens (Femspec). Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction’s potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist thewories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series. Patricia Melzer analyzes how these authors and films represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference, feminist critiques of science and technology, and the relationship among gender identity, body, and desire, including the new gender politics of queer desires, transgender, and intersexed bodies and identities. She demonstrates that key political elements shape these debates, including global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system; the impact of computer, industrial, and medical technologies on women’s lives and reproductive rights; and posthuman embodiment as expressed through biotechnologies, the body/machine interface, and the commodification of desire. Melzer’s investigation makes it clear that feminist writings and readings of science fiction are part of a feminist critique of existing power relations—and that the alien constructions (cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids) that populate postmodern science fiction are as potentially empowering as they are threatening. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Difference Identity and Colonial Experience in Feminist Science Fiction | 35 |
Technologies and Gender in Science Fiction Film | 103 |
Posthuman Embodiment Deviant Bodies Desire and Feminist Politics | 177 |
Conclusion | 259 |
Notes | 265 |
Bibliography | 299 |
Index | 317 |
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Alien Constructions Alien Resurrection Anyanwu becomes binary Black Women Butler Butler's narratives Calder's challenge colonized concept context creates critical cyberpunk cyberspace cyborg feminism Dead Girls debates defined desire destabilize developed discourse dolls dominant embodiment ence fiction existence experiences explore female body femi feminine feminist science fiction feminist theories figure gender identity genderqueer genetic genre gynoids Haraway heterosexual human hybrid ideology intersexed Judith Judith Butler lesbian Lilim Lilith machines mainstream male masculine material Matrix metaphor movie nature nist normative notion novel Oankali Octavia Butler Octavia Butler's Octavia E ooloi oppression Parable patriarchal political position postcolonial posthuman postmodern potential power relations queer race racial reality relationship representations reproduction resistance Ripley Ripley's role Routledge science fiction film science fiction texts sex/gender sexual difference shapeshifter social species structures subversive Survivor technoscience tion transgender transgressive trilogy un-human undermines Wild Seed woman writing Xenogenesis Xenogenesis trilogy York
Popular passages
Page 110 - ... ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by...
Page 296 - The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a "sexual instinct," on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is, of hunger. Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word "hunger," but science makes use of the word "libido
Page 67 - If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women and class has done to class and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality.
Page 173 - It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Page 24 - The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
Page 145 - It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
Page 24 - A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
Page 138 - Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos.
Page 14 - She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.
Page 177 - lesbian theories, gay theories," for as I've argued elsewhere,4 identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression.