Between Mania and Phobia

Extrapolation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-296
Author(s):  
Chad Andrews
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Technological Society ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction

The 1980s in the United States are now understood as years of widespread cultural and ideological fracture. Neoliberalism became the nation’s economic mantra, détente was jettisoned in favor of military build-up, and conservative backlash movements surfaced to counter the feminist gains of previous decades. These and other developments materialized out of a multitude of conflicts, a crisis of ideas, words, and practices competing to maintain or rework the nation’s defining structures. This paper argues that technology played a central role in the decade’s discordant years, both materially and ideologically, and that certain works of feminist science fiction—particularly by Lois McMaster Bujold, who is the focus here, but also Sheri S. Tepper, Octavia E. Butler, Joan Slonczewski, and others—imagined new structures and practices embedded within the confines of modern technoculture. By doing so, they avoided a prevailing dichotomy conceptualized by Carol Stabile: either technomania, a headlong, manic rush into all things technological, or technophobia, a retreat from such things into a romanticized and idyllic past. Situated between mania and phobia, these works imagined alternatives to the kind of binary thinking that dominates our political climate, as well as visions of what a radically reformed—but also deeply technological—society could look like.

The Republic of the Future

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-294
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Robert Walker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Math Teachers ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
The Republic ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Glass Metal

The United States produced a number of early utopian visions of suburban dispersal, demonstrating that Americans had inherited some of the anti-urban tendencies of their British forebears. An early feminist science-fiction novel by Mary Griffith insisted that cities could be great, but she was decidedly in the minority. After consuming British science fiction in the 1870s, American authors dominated utopian literature in the 1880s, many providing it with new urgency by engaging head-on with the rise of the industrial corporation. These writers were a heterogeneous bunch—ranging from math teachers to Spiritualist bohemians—but while they were often politically opposed to one another, they were consistent in their concept of utopia: life in large, complex cities such as New York or Boston was maddening, and a new world of glass, metal, synthetic stone, whirring machines, and, most importantly, endless greenery, needed to rise in place of the terrible city.

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Radway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Press ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

scholarly journals Is Deployment Desirable? An Examination of National Missile Defense Alternatives

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Teti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Missile Defense ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Rogue States ◽  
Policy Alternatives ◽  
Strategic Location ◽  
The Status ◽  
National Missile Defense

Today, the United States stands alone as the world's sole superpower. Traditionally, this status and the nation's strategic location has served as an effective national defense. However, with the rise of new threats from rogue states, terrorists, and new powers, the United States must determine whether current national defense policy is sufficient in the world's changing political climate. This article examines the possibility of deploying a National Missile Defense system (NMD). The author suggests three policy alternatives and explores the concerns surrounding the issue. The alternatives include maintaining the status quo, implementing a limited program, or full deploying a full NMD system. The author discusses the difficulty in implementing NMD, but suggests that the changing climate calls for action.

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.

The More Ethnic the Face, the More Important the Race: A Closer Look at Colorism and Employment Opportunities among Middle Eastern Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 016059762093288
Author(s):  
Ahzin Bahraini
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Middle Eastern Women ◽  
Middle Eastern Population ◽  
The Face ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Middle Easterners

Colorism is the intra- and interracial discrimination an individual experiences based on one’s phenotype. Current research focused on colorism among black Americans has found that “dark-skinned blacks have lower levels of education, income, and job status” in the United States. As bias against Middle Easterners rises in the United States, current research regarding this population is scarce. In the context of today’s political climate, the term Muslim has become a misnomer to refer to the Middle Eastern population, with the term Islamophobia specifically referring to Middle Easterners regardless of their religion rather than individuals from regions of the world who practice Islam. Participants ordered job applicants in terms of who they would hire, followed by interviews. Through 16 semi-structured interviews, this project identifies what participants believe are phenotypically Middle Eastern and Muslim facial features. Throughout the study, participants preferred to hire lighter Middle Eastern women.

Political Climate, Voter Suppression Policies and Federal Sentencing Outcomes

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 1155-1180
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S Nowacki ◽  
Danielle Creech ◽  
Megan Parks
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
District Courts ◽  
Racial Threat ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
The Us ◽  
Voter Suppression ◽  
And Gender

Abstract Many states in the United States have recently implemented voter suppression policies, which make voting more difficult, particularly for members of marginalized populations (e.g. non-white and female voters). In this article, we examine how these policies and other measures of political climate influence criminal sentencing in US district courts. Using 2015 data from the US Sentencing Commission, alongside other district-level measures, we find both direct and conditioning relationships between political climate and extra-legal variables. Specifically, we find that, while voter suppression policies do not directly affect sentence length, racial threat effects are enhanced in districts governed by such policies. Conversely, districts without such policies see larger mitigating effects at high levels of ethnic diversity and gender equality.

scholarly journals Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?

Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin de la Iglesia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Genre Awareness

Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.

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.

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