Description
Book SynopsisTechnologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women’s bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.
Trade Review“This innovative and important collection will be useful to scholars of sf literature and film, as well as to those particularly interested in the analysis of potentially liberatory or oppressive effects of current and developing technologies. … This book is an extremely useful and timely intervention and the editors succeed in their announced goal … .” (Sara Hosey, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 50, 2023)
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Sociotechnical Design and the Future of GenderPart I Reproductive Technologies2. Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first-Century British Science Fiction3. Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human4. Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s
The Carhullan Army5. Groomed for Survival – Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai's
The Tiger FluPart II Reimagining the Woman6. A Housewife’s Dream? Automation and the Problem of Women’s Free Time7. Motherhood Beyond Woman:
I Am [a Good]
Mother and Predecessors Onscreen8. Gender and Reproduction in the Dystopian Works of Sayaka Murata9. Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in
Athena’s ChoicePart III Queering Gender10. Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction11. Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction12. Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for LiberationPart IV Posthuman Females13. Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s
Ex Machina14. Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction. Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s
The Woman Who Died A Lot15. ‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs: Food Futures, and Feminism in SF from the Global South16. Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non)Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s
Future Home of the Living God
