Gender and Environment in Science Fiction

Edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell - Contributions by Jill E. Anderson; Steve Asselin; Stina Attebery; Bridgitte Barclay; Amelia Z. Greene; Tyler Harper; Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns; Juan Juvé; Carter Soles; Christy Tidwell and Michelle Yates

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.

Lexington Books

Pages: 238 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-8057-1 • Hardback • November 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-8059-5 • Paperback • July 2020 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-8058-8 • eBook • July 2020 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / General, Social Science / Women's Studies

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 238 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-8057-1 • Hardback • November 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-8059-5 • Paperback • July 2020 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-8058-8 • eBook • July 2020 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / General, Social Science / Women's Studies

Author

Bridgitte Barclay is associate professor of English and co-director of the gender studies minor at Aurora University.

Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology.

Table of Contents

Part One: Performing Humanity, Animality, and Gender

Chapter One: Female Beasties: Camp Resistance in 1950s Wom-Animal Creature Features

Bridgitte Barclay

Chapter Two: “Either you’re mine or you’re not mine”: Controlling Gender, Nature, and Technology in Her and Ex Machina

Christy Tidwell

Chapter Three: Octavia Butler and the Language of the Flesh: Re-Writing Nature in Wild Seed

Amelia Z. Greene

Part Two: Gendering the Natural World

Chapter Four: Tendrils, Tentacles, and Flower Power: Speciesism in Womaneater (1958) and The Gardener (1974)

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Juan Juvé

Chapter Five: “So Very Natural an Occurrence”: Engendering Nature’s Antagonism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Steve Asselin

Part Three: Contemporary Queering

Chapter Six: Engineered Nature, (En)gendered Nature in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312

Tyler Harper

Chapter Seven: Ecologies of Sound: Queer Intimacy, Trans-Corporeality, and Reproduction in

Upstream Color

Stina Attebery

Part Four: “We Don’t Need Another Hero”

Chapter Eight: Nature Boys & Bears in Pants: Ecoqueer Hybrid Heroes in Atomic Age Comics

Jill E. Anderson

Chapter Nine: Saving Eden: Whiteness, Masculinity, and Environmental Nostalgia in Soylent Green and WALL-E

Michelle Yates

Chapter Ten: Mad Max: Beyond Petroleum?

Carter Soles

Reviews

Science fiction scholars should ensure that their library has a copy of this fine collection, and scholars interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the environment in SF should get the paperback for their personal libraries.

— Sfra Review

This collection is certainly well worth reading for any science fiction scholar. Similarly, scholars specialising in ecocriticism or gender studies, as well as those interested specifically in ecohorror, will also find compelling essays here to interest them.

— Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic

Wasp Woman, fembots, bears in pants. A motley crowd of creatures and theories show up to this campy, monstrous, intellectual gathering, exposing the interrelations between science studies, ecomaterialism, disability studies, feminist theory, queer inhumanisms, cross-species kinships, Woman and Beast. Winding through a fantastic array of SF films and SF fiction, this important collection maps the intersections between gender studies and environmental studies as it calls us to craft livable futures. Don’t miss it!
— Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction emerges at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, critical race and empire studies, disability studies, animal studies, media theory, utopianism, posthumanism, and more to become an instant classic in the study of science fiction. With a two-century span covering critical mainstays of the genre like Mary Shelley, Octavia E. Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson alongside unexpected visitors like Scarlett Johansson, the Wasp Woman, Mad Max, and Smokey the Bear, Tidwell and Barclay have gathered together an absolutely essential collection of sharp, pointed, and wickedly clever scholarly interventions that chart exciting new directions for the field.
— Gerry Canavan, Associate Professor of 20th and 21st Century Literature, Marquette University, author of Octavia E. Butler

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction offers powerful new ways for thinking about the complex intersections between gender and nature, refusing an easy equation of woman=nature=environmentalism. Addressing a range of texts from novels by luminaries such as Mary Shelley and Kim Stanley Robinson, to popular film such as Ex Machina and Mad Max, this volume demonstrates that the connections between gender and the environment are neither obvious or necessarily harmonious. The essays collected here bring disability studies, queer theory, and posthumanism into the conversation, unifying their concerns with sustained attention to the materiality of the body, to offer innovative new perspectives on how science fiction speaks powerful to feminist and environmentalist scholars, and to connections between them.
— Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside

The insights of Donna Haraway and Stacy Alaimo reverberate often in these consistently provocative, intersectional re-framings of novels by Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson as well as science fiction and horror films and comics from the 1950s to the 2010s. If you ever marvel that it's still 'Mother Nature' or wonder how and why misogynist, heteronormative thinking continues to shape our species and its relationships with others, this ecofeminist collection will prove revealing.
— Everett Hamner, Western Illinois University

The fascinating, original essays collected in Gender and Environment in Science Fiction engage a range of important and intersecting critical perspectives while attending to a diverse body of both canonical and relatively unknown and understudied science fiction works. This book is a welcomed expansion of ecocritical gender scholarship via incisive race-, feminist-, and queer-themed analyses of novels, films, comics, and characters—all of which the editors and contributors address with detailed and convincing scholarly insight.
— Eric Otto, Florida Gulf Coast University

This book delivers shrewd analyses of a wonderful and quirky range of SF texts. Barclay and Tidwell situate the project brilliantly, and the collection as a whole will illuminate familiar texts anew and add unfamiliar stories to your high-priority reading and screening queues.
— Andrew Hageman, Luther College