Feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation. This groundbreaking collection includes contributors from across the globe who find effective venues for imagining feminist thought experiments. A multinational perspective runs through this innovative volume, focusing on the latest dynamic trends in feminist science fiction, such as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field.
Almost 20 years after the publication of Future Females: A Critical Anthology, feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation. This groundbreaking collection includes contributors from across the globe who find effective venues for imagining feminist thought experiments. A multinational perspective runs through this innovative volume, focusing on the latest dynamic trends in feminist science fiction. These include such issues as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field. Future Females, the Next Generation, which establishes the generational continuity characterizing a vibrant area of feminist literary and cultural inquiry, boldly goes where no feminist science fiction critical anthology has gone before.
Anita Harris creates a realistic portrait of the "new girl" that has appeared in the twenty-first century--she may still play with Barbie, but she is also likely to play soccer or basketball, be assertive and may even be sexually aware, if not active. Building on this new definition, Harris explores the many key areas central to the lives of girls from a global perspective, such as girlspace, schools, work, aggression, sexuality and power.
In 2020, the lives of Australian women changed irrevocably. With insight, intelligence and empathy, Jane Gilmore, Santilla Chingaipe and Emily J. Brooks explore this through the lenses of work, love and body, and ask: Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal than the one we were born into? Or will women and girls remain left behind? While our country was shrouded in smoke in the early months of 2020, Australian women went about their daily business. They worked, studied, cleaned, did school runs, made meals. And they postponed looking after themselves because life got in the way. Then, in March, Australians were told to lock down. For all the talk of equality, it was primarily women who held the health of our communities in their hands as they took on the essential jobs to care, to nurse and to teach, despite an invisible danger. One year later, women across the country would march on behalf of those who were not safe in workplaces and their own homes. Never before has change been thrust so abruptly on modern Australian women - 2020 impacted our working lives, relationships and our health and wellbeing. And as a growing number of women agitate for change, it is time to demand what women want. So where do we go from here? One thing is very clear: the future is now, and it is female.
"A justification for paying serious attention to science fiction may by now be necessary only for other literary critics and scholars. Still, the question of why a book addressing itself to science fiction has to be faced briefly." This comment, the opening statement of Darko Suvins' recent book, is of concern to Professor Barr, editor of this volume, since Future Females is addressing itself to women in science fiction. Metaphorically speaking, if the mere mention of the genre causes a ruffling of academic feathers, then, relating to women is analogous to placing all those simply ruffled feathers in front of a wind machine. Everyone will not welcome a volume where science fiction is viewed in terms of women, but Professor Barr felt such a volume is needed. As Roger Schlobin's bibliography indicates, women are certainly contributing continuously to the science fiction field. This collection of essays illuminates some of this fiction.
Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical a
A new collection on women in American television in the 90s uncovers a cultural obsession with tough yet sexy heroines in mythical pasts, the 'girl power' present, and utopic futures. Xena, Buffy, Sabrina, and a host of other characters have become household words, as well as icons of pop culture 'feminism.' Their popularity makes for successful programming, however, how much does this trend truly represent a contemporary feminist breakthrough? And what does it mean for feminism in the next few decades? Fantasy Girls: Navigating the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television seeks to explore as well as challenge the power and the promises of this recent media phenomenon. Such TV programming offers the exciting opportunity to rethink established gender norms, but how far is it really pushing the limits of the status quo? Amidst the exuberant optimism of fanzines and doting fan websites, the contributors to this volume endeavor to provide us with a much needed critical analysis of this contemporary trend. These essays explore the contradictions and limitations inherent in the genre, forcing readers to take a fresh and critical look through a variety of lenses including girl power, postfeminism, cyborg feminism, disability politics, queer studies, and much more. Programs covered are Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Disney's Cinderella, Lois and Clark, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Star Trek: Voyager, The X-Files, Third Rock from the Sun, and Xena: Warrior Princess.
2012 was a year of financial crises and ecological disasters, of endings and forebodings. The world did not end on December 21st as the Mayan calendar predicted, but became the stage for new beginnings, utopian communities, protest groups and solidarity movements. The essays in this book form an intertextual space for negotiating meaningful facts and fictions with an aim to understanding the present. Discussions focus on utopia and dystopia from literature and film, not only within the framework of science fiction but also critical theory, gender politics and social sciences. The authors of these essays are international academics whose interest lies in utopian studies and who attended the 13th International Conference of Utopian Studies, “The Shape of Things to Come”, held in Tarragona, Spain, in 2012.
"Science fiction" can be translated into "real unreality." More than a genre like fantasy, which creates entirely new realms of possibility, science fiction constructs its possibilities from what is real, from what is, indeed, possible, or conceivably so. This collection, then, looks to understand and explore the "unreal reality," to note ways in which our culture's continually changing and evolving mores of sex and sexuality are reflected in, dissected by, and deconstructed through the genre of science fiction. This book is a collection of new essays, with the general objective of filling a gap in the literature about sex and science fiction (although some work has gone before, none of it is recent). The essays herein explore the myriad ways in which authors--regardless of format (print, film, television, etc.)--envision very different beings expressing this most fundamental of human behaviors.
Transgressing Women focuses on the literary and cinematic representation of female characters in contemporary noir thrillers. The book argues that as the genre has grown, expanded and been subverted since its initial conception, along with the changing definition of gender, the representation of a female character has also inevitably gone through some dramatic changes. So, the book asks some important questions: What links the female characters in canonical noir to their contemporary counterparts? Is gender division still relevant in a text that transgresses gender boundaries? What happens when it is the human body itself that betrays the traditional definition or constitution of a human being? While many have written about the male protagonists and the femmes fatales in the noir genre, little attention has been given to the ‘other’ female characters who inhabit the noir world and are transgressors themselves. The main concern of the book is to trace the transgressive female characters in contemporary noir thrillers – both novels and films – by engaging itself with some of the most topical debates within both (post)feminist and postmodernist theories. The book is structured around two key concepts – space and the body. These temporal and spatial indicators are central in contemporary cultural theories such as postmodernism and post-feminism, along with other theorizations of gender and the noir genre. This means that the analysis is drawn from the classical noir examples and will then arrive at the neo-noir sub-genre, and then will move on to the most recent phenomenon in the genre, ‘future noir’.
