Feminism and Science Fiction: A Syllabus
I’m teaching a course on Feminism and Science Fiction in the fall. The course emphasizes thinking through chronological wormholes—connections and disconnections between today and yesterday, the feminist movement of the 1970s and the feminist movement of today.
How can feminist find solidarity and resonance (or discord and dissonance) with the voices of the past? What has been lost over the years, and what has been won in the fight? How have feminist ideas evolved, morphed, died, and returned?
We’ll be reading, viewing, or listening to the following for the course.
bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody
A classic of feminist classrooms, hooks distills (and complicates) what it means to be a feminist, even as she declares it is for everybody. I like to use this text as a way to expand my students’ views of feminism (beyond “women’s rights”—which is a good part of feminism, but not the sole part of a multitudinous movement). It helps us get some key terms into the classroom conversation as well—feminism, power, patriarchy, gender, sex, sexuality, solidarity.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Herland is another feminist classic—once lost, restored in the second wave of feminism, and now a staple in many different fields (although not without its own baggage). Last semester when I taught this course, many of the students considered this their favorite of the works we looked at because of its vision. I use it as a way to ground the historical aspect of our conversation, while also using excerpts from Alexis Lothian (Old Futures) and Abby L. Goode (Agrotopias) to complicate the approach (and show scholarly contexts to the students).
Poetry by Julia Boynton Green, Virginia Kidd, Leah Bodine Drake, and Tigrina
Green, Kidd, Drake, and Tigrina are poets of the early 20th century that I don’t know too much about, so I’m excited to learn along with my students about early poetry. I know about the latter 20th century SF movement under Suzette Haden Elgin’s influence, but these older ones I’m pulling from an anthology called Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp to help ground our discussion of the poetry.
Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother”
Merril is a mid-century author who wrote during what Lis Yaszek has termed “galactic suburbia”—a time in SFs history when housewives wrote and domestic science fiction thought through the horrors of nuclear war (and its fallout). How did women respond to the threat of World War III? What was a mother’s point of view when aliens invaded? Merril doesn’t answer all of these, but she is writing in that vein.
Alice Eleanor Jones, “Created He Them”
Like Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones wrote in a similar vein about domestic and women’s issues. Merril and Jones are meant to show the mid-20th century vibes of feminism, especially as Yaszek, in her Galactic Suburbia, argues.
James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (Radio play)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? is a fun one for this classroom because of how much it mimics Gilman’s Herland, even though it was written before it returned to vogue. The story is about three men lost in space who jump forward in time and come across a spaceship ran by no men. Come to find out men have been wiped out off Earth—welcome to a new Herland, where cloning instead of parthenogenesis is the flavor of reproduction.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Le Guin is staple feminist SF of the 20th century. We read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in my last version of this course, but I wanted to really dive into Le Guin’s approach to gender and androgyny in this tale of anthropological discovery.
Anne McCaffrey, “The Ship Who Sang” & Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto
The course is set up through various days focusing on literature and then other days focusing on feminist theory. This lesson uses McCaffrey’s short story as a way to understand Haraway’s cyborg and what it means to expand feminism beyond humanistic tendencies.
Suzy McKee Charnas, A Walk to the End of the World
Feminists got too loud so men decided to nuke the world and start over. What better scenario for a feminist science fiction book and to talk about the intricacies of what “fighting the patriarchy” means?
Zenna Henderson, “Subcommittee”
I discovered Henderson when reading Yaszek, and come to find out that she influenced Butler (and Orson Scott Card—Henderson has range!). “Subcommittee” is a fun short story about engaging in first contact and alien negotiations. It’s paired with a chapter by Anzaldua.
Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer
Monae’s Dirty Computer will be our connective tissue text between the past and present as we think about how bodies are used (and abused).
Pamela S. Sargent, Shore of Women
Returning to the recurring theme from Herland, Houston, Houston, and other stories, Shore of Women sets up questions about biologic essentialism and relationships of power. It’s representative of many feminist utopias: a world that is split between men, as the reproductive engine but also savagely natural, and women, as the civilized and utopian.
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn
Dawn brings in questions of power and hierarchy that complicate our understanding of the relationships between people/beings. After humans cause a nuclear holocaust, aliens arrive to save humanity because they need to splice their cancerous genes into their own species.
Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue
How can women deal with the patriarchy when they must speak its language, operate in its world, and struggle under its thumb? Elgin’s far-future dystopia seeks to eliminate the oppressive structure through language—but also show the futility(?) of that attempt.
Essays by Kameron Hurley, Joanna Russ, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, Alexis Lothian, and Abby L. Goode
The readings are supplemented with essays by some current authors and academics (Hurley, Lothian, Goode) and some theorists and authors (Russ, Anzaldua, and Butler).
Students also get to choose one of four options as their semester-long project, in which they read the text over the course of the semester and bring it into conversation with the texts we’ve been discussing in class as part of their final essay. I’ll leave off adding my own thoughts about them, since I worry sometimes about my students finding these posts, but all of them relate to the broader conversation trends occurring through the literature and the class discussion.
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
Naomi Alderman, The Power
N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
I’m really looking forward to the discussions my students will bring to the classroom.
