scholarly journals Ectogenesis and Representations of Future Motherings in Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Growing Season ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
The Family ◽  
Biological Explanation ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Near Future

After the boom of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, many such novels have tackled the different sociocultural understandings of gender and sexual reproduction. Conventionally, patriarchal thinking tends to posit a biological explanation for gender inequality: women are supposed to be child bearers and the primary caregivers, whereas men should provide for the family through their work. However, if men could share procreation, would these views change? A recent work of fiction exploring this question from multiple perspectives is Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), a novel that presents a near future in which babies can be grown in artificial wombs that can be carried around. As an analysis of the novel will show, The Growing Season creatively explores the existing tensions among contemporary understandings of motherhood and feminism(s), as well as developments in reproductive biotechnology, through the different perspectives offered by the heterodiegetic third-person narration and multiple focalisation. Ultimately, the voices of the different characters in the novel convey a polyhedral vision of possible future feminist motherhood(s) where ideas of personal freedom and codependency are radically reconceptualised—a rethinking that becomes especially important nowadays, for the biotechnological elements of this fictional dystopia are already a reality.

scholarly journals Futurismo arcaizante: descolonización y anarcofeminismo en De cuando en cuando Saturnina

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Hannah A. Burdette
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Oral History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Back Cover ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Drawing on the description of De cuando en cuando Saturnina by Alison Spedding as “native anarco–feminist science fiction” announced on the back cover of its first edition (2004), this article proposes an interconnected reading of these four axes (futurism, Aymara logic, anarchism, and feminism). I argue that the structure of this “oral history of the future” conveys  a critical resolve to avoid positing the reinstatement of Qullasuyu as the utopic horizon of an idyllic society, while the text as a whole remains  committed to a radical decolonization of Bolivia anchored in an autonomous cultural grammar. In this sense, the novel offers a critical vision not only of the coloniality that Aymara culture has endured but also of certain challenges internal to Aymara society itself, particularly in regards to gender hierarchy. Partiendo de la descripción de la novela De cuando en cuando Saturnina  (Alison Spedding, 2004) como “ciencia ficción originaria anarco–feminista” declarada  en  la  contratapa  de  la  primera  edición,  el  presente trabajo propone una lectura entrecruzada de estos cuatro ejes (futurismo, lógica aymara, anarquismo y feminismo). Leo en la estructura de la “historia oral del futuro” una voluntad crítica que rehúye cualquier tentación de ver la reinstauración de Qullasuyu  como  horizonte utópico de una sociedad idílica, pero que al mismo tiempo apuesta a una descolonización radical de Bolivia anclada  en  una   gramática   cultural   autónoma  y  propia.  Así,  la  novela despliega una visión crítica no sólo de la colonialidad a la que ha estado sometida la cultura aymara  sino  también  de  ésta misma y de sus desafíos internos, particularmente en relación a jerarquías de género.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

Feminist Bunker Fantasies

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-262
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Spatial Association ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Cultural Perception ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Nuclear Condition

Feminist science fiction emerged during the late 1970s as a creative and political force, with the nuclear condition as a core element of this new form and its new approach to science fiction. Despite the full awareness and acknowledgment of the horrors underpinning the postapocalyptic world, this body of work as a whole is hopeful and open to the future in ways that most other 1980s bunker fantasies were not. These are not only survivors’ songs, in other words; they are critical engagements with the complexity of historical change that refunctioned the spaces of the Cold War into new configurations. One of the primary, and often the only, positively bunkered spaces in the texts themselves during this period were the analogous forms of language, storytelling, words, and writing. While the positive, enabling bunker potentials of language—and the stultifying effects of its loss—remain a constant theme through this period, the changing representations of physical spaces in relation to language fall into roughly three periods, analogous to political changes in the cultural perception of nuclear threat. The sheltering power of language remains a constant throughout, as do the spatial association of the fallout shelter with masculine social structures and the nuclear condition, along with the central problematic of reproduction and reproductive futurism in relation to survival in a post-holocaust world; however, writers’ treatment of these themes changes.

Home and Away

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-177
Author(s):  
Micha Rahder
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
New Development ◽  
Gaia Theory

This article examines the reinvigoration of outer space imaginaries in the era of global environmental change, and the impacts of these imaginaries on Earth. Privatized space research mobilizes fears of ecological, political, or economic catastrophe to garner support for new utopian futures, or the search for Earth 2.0. These imaginaries reflect dominant global discourses about environmental and social issues, and enable the flow of earthly resources toward an extraterrestrial frontier. In contrast, eco-centric visions emerging from Gaia theory or feminist science fiction project post-earthly life in terms that are ecological, engaged in multispecies relations and ethics, and anticapitalist. In these imaginaries, rather than centering humans as would-be destroyers or saviors of Earth, our species becomes merely instrumental in launching life—a multispecies process—off the planet, a new development in deep evolutionary time. This article traces these two imaginaries and how they are reshaping material and political earthly life.

The Dialectic of Sex, after the Post-1960s

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342
Author(s):  
Madeline Lane-McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second Wave

A key artifact of the political contradictions and utopian problematics of women’s liberation and the tradition of radical feminism at the end of the 1960s, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex remains a site of controversies, misinterpretations, and unmet challenges. This essay considers the critical capacity of this text at the present juncture, strongly characterized by the reactionary resurgence of second-wave feminism and a trans-exclusionary brand of radical feminism. While both illuminating and symptomatizing many of the contradictions and failures of radical feminism, Firestone’s text also strongly resonates with the critical utopian interventions of queer-feminist science fiction writing in the early 1970s. This critique of The Dialectic of Sex seeks to rearticulate some of Firestone’s key concepts within a critical utopian framework and to reconceptualize the text’s contributions to radical feminism in relation to a contemporary project of revolutionary feminism. To do this, the author suggests, requires a more nuanced approach to historicizing and engaging with political confusion—marking a matter of great urgency for the current cultural landscape.

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