The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction: An Experience of the Impossible

ISBN-13: 9781032503509 / Angielski

Eleanor Drage

Opis

The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction argues that utopian SF written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination.

This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series; Elia Barceló’s Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepción Regueiro. It sets these in conversation with key gender and critical race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti-racism, and SF now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions.

Offering unique access to contemporary and historical women writers who have mobilised the utopian imagination to rethink the human, this book is of use to those conducting research in Gender Studies, Philosophy, History, and Literature.

Spis treści

Introduction and Roadmap 

Chapter 1: Towards New Forms of Humanism 

Chapter 2: Contextualising the History of Science Fiction 

Chapter 3: Re-historicising the Future: Re-contextualising Systems of Race and Gender in Women’s Sciece Fiction 

Chapter 4: Embodying New Forms of Humanism: The Fate of Race and Gender in Queer Assemblages 

Chapter 5: Pregnancy, by Mistake: Transgressing Race and Gender Through Queered Extraterrestrial Fertility 

Chapter 6: Non-Reproductive Planetary Communities: Race, Gender, Kinship, and Forgetting to Conform 

Chapter 7: At the Borders of the Planetary 

Chapter 8: Conclusion: New Forms of Humanism 

Summaries of Primary Science Fiction Texts

O autorze

Eleanor Drage is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she applies feminism and anti- racism to the ethics of artificial intelligence.