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Grokking Gender: Understanding Sexual Pleasure & Empathy in 1960s Science Fiction

Holland, Anika R
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1492389983184444

Abstract Details

2017, Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, English.
Though some critics have often approached science fiction derisively, dismissing the genre as escapist, idealistic, or too depressing, many others have instead embraced its capacity to enable “thought experiments” about the future, about science and technology, and even about what it means to be human (Le Guin xiv). Ursula K. Le Guin, who is both an author and critic of science fiction, famously suggested that though these thought experiments are indeed extrapolative, “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (xiv). Despite its strange tropes of aliens, spaceships, distant planets, robots, and apocalypses, the worlds constructed in science fiction reflect the world around us, and reveal some things about our existing sociocultural structures that we might not have noticed otherwise. Consequently, works of science fiction have the unsettling effect of “defamiliariz[ing] certain taken-for granted aspects of ordinary human reality” (Hollinger 129). In other words, science fiction has a habit of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. In this way, the themes of science fiction often overlap with the endeavors of feminist, gender, and queer theory: questioning identity categories, challenging the conventions of gender and sexuality, and calling attention to inequality. As Brian Attebery argues in Gender and Science Fiction, “both gender codes and the specialized vocabulary and narrative techniques of science fiction frequently fulfill the social function of marking boundaries” (3). Both feminism and sf “mark” normative boundaries, making them visible in order to upend them. Veronica Hollinger, a renowned feminist sf critic, takes the position that “analogous to feminist reading, feminist sf is not simply about women [...] it is a potent tool for feminist imaginative projects that are the necessary first steps in undertaking the cultural and social transformations that are the aims of the feminist political enterprise” (Hollinger 128). The convergence of gender theory and science fiction can be deeply thought provoking at times, as when Ursula Le Guin creates an androgynous society in The Left Hand of Darkness. Or, at other times, this convergence can reveal the humorous extension of a heterosexist imagination, as when Robert A. Heinlein ponders the implications of telepathy for a man watching a female burlesque dancer in Las Vegas in Stranger in a Strange Land. Lest we give too much credit to the genre for its feminist potential, we should bear in mind Hollinger’s warning that “although sf has often been called `the literature of change’, for the most part is has been slow to recognize the historical contingency and cultural conventionality of many of our ideas about sexual identity and desire, about gendered behavior and about the `natural’ roles of women and men” (Hollinger 126). Though some works of science fiction are truly feminist projects, others maintain normative heteropatriarchal expectations, and many do both at once.
Nicole Reynolds, Dr. (Advisor)
Joseph McLaughlin, Dr. (Other)
112 p.
American Literature; American Studies; Gender Studies
science fiction; sf; gender; sexuality; feminist; empathy; heinlein; le guin; dick

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Citations

  • Holland, A. R. (2017). Grokking Gender: Understanding Sexual Pleasure & Empathy in 1960s Science Fiction [Electronic thesis or dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1492389983184444

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Holland, Anika. Grokking Gender: Understanding Sexual Pleasure & Empathy in 1960s Science Fiction. 2017. Ohio University, Electronic thesis or dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1492389983184444.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Holland, Anika. "Grokking Gender: Understanding Sexual Pleasure & Empathy in 1960s Science Fiction." Electronic thesis or dissertation, Ohio University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1492389983184444

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ouhonors1492389983184444
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University Honors Tutorial College and OhioLINK.