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Set For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental GendersComparative Literature 40: Women's Studies 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 Course DescriptionSet For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental GendersWhen 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 RequirementsSet For Stun: Science Fiction, Experimental GendersRequired Texts:
Films:
Requirements for the course:
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