| The 1980s and 1990s have seen a major influx of women writing and publishing science fiction that makes use of the genre's extrapolative potential in order to embody ideas around gender and sexuality. Using an evolutionary model of genre development, I explore the new genre of feminist science fiction as a rich and fluid pedagogical tool for teaching and learning about the critical debates that surround gender and sexuality in the late twentieth century. The advent of hypertext, made familiar by growing access to the World Wide Web, provides us with a complex metaphor for considering the multiplicity of fluid and dynamic positions that coexist symbiotically within gender studies. This complex W/web of ideas is productively embodied in several recent works of feminist science fiction, which I discuss in relation to various feminist and queer positions.;My desire to elucidate the dynamic relationships between various theoretical positions is accompanied by a wish to add some focussed literary analysis to the modest, but growing, body of work that treats feminist science fiction. I rely heavily on the pioneering work of Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, who have contributed enormously to the emergence of this genre through their fiction, literary criticism and teaching. I have chosen not to engage in detailed analysis of their novels in order to examine works which have received less critical attention, namely: Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves (1972), Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, (1987,88,89), Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers series (1989,90,92,94), Leona Gom's The Y Chromosome (1990), Elisabeth Vonarburg's The Maerlande Chronicles (1992), and Carolyn Gilman's Halfway Human (1998). |
