by Sarah Murray

Created on: January 27, 2009

Science fiction has often been described by critics as a dominantly masculine genre. Given its fundamental concern with science and technology, with the sort of controlling concepts and technologies that feminist criticism has usually linked to the dominating structures of a patriarchal culture and often taking the distinctly phallic shape of rocket ships, ray guns, tunnelling devices, and light sabres SF has proved a fertile ground for exploring a narrative pattern which depicts men do while women watch

appreciatively. Although that dynamic has undergone some radical revision in the past 2 decades, thanks to films like Aliens
(1986), Cherry 2000 (1987) and Terminator 2, all of which have pointedly situated women in positions of technological mastery as wielders of hardware, as creators (technological mothers) of key programs, as the order givers in a technical culture the full range of contemporary SF films have become texts for reconsidering the larger, masculinist emphasis of the genre and for suggesting how it might be reconceived along feminist lines.

In this sense, one can pinpoint a convergence between feminism and SF since the 1970s that has resulted in the production of texts in which gender and identity are central, as is the depiction of new and different sets of social and sexual relations. The intersection of feminism and SF has produced an emphasis on provisionality, in that it has resulted in the production of texts whose recognisable generic boundaries and continuities are consistently undermined by their subject matter. As Anne Cranny-Francis has indicated in her study of what she calls feminist genre fiction':

Feminist theory and the experiential knowledge of women went into the making of feminist SF and the result was the remaking of a literary genre, a fundamental investigation of the conventions of that genre, both for their literary or narrative implications and for their embedded ideological significance(s).(Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction, 43)

The investigation' of the genre has been informed by more than feminist theory and experiential knowledge. As we will see in the next lectures, the intersections between SF and postmodernism, as well as those between feminism and postmodernism, and feminism and SF, have contributed to the complex accounts of gender and identity offered in feminist SF.

The fragmented and decentred narrative of Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975, 1985) is a notable example of a text

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