Set For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental Genders
Comparative Literature 40: Women's Studies
Summer 1997
Instructor: Despina Kakoudaki
This class was a Summer Session Seminar, for the Departments of Comparative Literature and Women's Studies. The course focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in the work of women science fiction authors.
Course Description
Texts and Requirements
Course Description
Set For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental Genders
When writers imagine other planets, time travel, alternate states and realities, they create possibilities for fictive futures, and simultaneously challenge the social identities available in the present and in the past. For the women authors we are going to read in this class, science fiction becomes the medium for an intense questioning of the present and of history, at the same time that it allows for experiments with conventional forms, such as narrative structure and referentiality. We will explore how these authors engage science fiction themes and concerns through a variety of genres, from novels to short fiction, film, plays, comic books and a manifesto.
In these texts, women authors challenge the traditional representation of women in science fiction, which we will discuss in relation to Barbarella and a variety of comic books. Then, they use the possibilities that science fiction allows to create new social and sexual identities, propose new gender roles, and question the convention of science fiction itself. Beginning with the social terms of the feminist utopia of Herland, we will consider the multiple sexual identities presented in The Female Man and the way in which the particular vocabulary of the theatre illuminates questions about gender and sexuality in Cloud Nine and Top Girls. How do these formal renovations relate to questions of history? Why is science fiction the medium for these experiments? What utopian and dystopian landscapes of gender possibility do these authors posit?
Texts and Requirements
Set For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental Genders
Required Texts:
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman
Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine and Top Girls,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Doris Lessing, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five
(As narrated by the chroniclers of Zone Three)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Films:
Barbarella (1968), Roger Vadim
The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Volker Schlondorff
Liquid Sky (1983), Slava Tsukerman
Strange Days (1995), Kathryn Bigelow
Requirements for the course:
* class presence and participation
* occasional in class writings and responses
* one 5-7 page midterm paper
* one 8-10 page final paper (on the students' own research including other science fiction works for example by Octavia Butler, Monique Witting, or Anne McCaffrey)
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