The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction

Lisa Yaszek is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, US, and past president of the Science Fiction Research Association; her recent books include Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Future Is Female! series (2018–present). Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean at Michigan State University, US, and focuses on Eastern European science fiction and the amplification of global science fiction studies. Keren Omry is Senior Lecturer of contemporary US fiction at the University of Haifa, Israel, where she researches and teaches on Alternate Histories, Science Fiction, and African-American literature. Wendy Gay Pearson is Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada whose research focuses on queer and trans science fiction; with Veronica Holinger and Joan Gordon, she is co-editor of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008).

Part One, What: Gender and Genre






"Introduction: A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the Science Fiction Anthology"
Lisa Yaszek



"Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction"
Ida Yoshinaga
Part Two, How: Theoretical Approaches




"Introduction to How: Theoretical Approaches"
Lisa Yaszek



"Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale"
Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint



"Beyond Survival: Climate Change and Reproduction in The Handmaid’s Tale, Birthstones, and The Fifth Season"
Anna Bedford



"Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many"
Beyond Gender Research Collective



"Queer SF"
Ritch Calvin



"Renovating the System: The Matrix Resurrections and Trans Resistance to Neoliberal Integration"
Terra Gasque



"Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish: Feminisms and Animal Studies in Science Fiction"
Joan Gordon



"Asexual and Genderless Futures"
Anna Kurowicka



"Making the End Times Great Again: Post-Apocalypses, Preppers, and the Politics of Patriarchy on American Television"
Carlen Lavigne



"Decoding Masculinity in 21st Century Science Fiction by Men: Two Case Studies in Reconceptualizing Patriarchy"
Sara Martín



"I Came for the ‘Pew-Pew Space Battles’; I Stayed for the Autism": Martha Wells’ Murderbot"
Robin Reid



"The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s ‘Evidence’"
R. Nicole Smith



"Feminist Science Fiction Art"
Smin Smith
Part Three, Who: Subjectivities




"Introduction"
Wendy Gay Pearson



"All Hail the Trans Cyborg" Autonomous as an Analogy of Trans Becoming"
Jacob Barry



"Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency"
Peyton Campbell



"Like ‘A Bolt Out of the Blue’: Stories of Gender Transformation from the GDR"
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming



"New Pronouns and New Uses: Gender Variance and Language in Contemporary Science Fiction"
Misha Grifka Wander



"Not Just Boys and Toys: Gender and Intersectionality in SF for Children"
Emily Midkiff



"Speculations against Gender Discrimination: A Study of the Indian Speculative Fiction’s Growing Engagement with Gender Issues"
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay



"Feminist Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism"
Graham J. Murphy



"Trans without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship between Transness and Sex Change in the Works of John Varley"
Wendy Gay Pearson



"Unruly Bodies: Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex Desire in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl"
Agnieszka Podruczna



"Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe: Explorations of Traditional Chinese Gender Roles in Chi Hui’s ‘Nest of Insects’"
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker



"Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Portrayals of Sex and Desire in the Speculative Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo Hopkinson"
Sara Wenger
Part Four, Where: Media and Transmedialities




"Introduction"
Keren Omry



"Representation and Performance of Gender in Science Fiction Video Games and Game Mods"
Paweł Frelik



"Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory"
Danielle Girard



"Subverting, Re-fashioning, or Re-inscribing the Power of the Male Gaze: Feminism, Fashion, and Cyberpunk Style"



Rebecca J. Holden



"Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappines"
Susan Knabe



"Afro-feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction"
Nedine Moonsamy



"Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club"
Jaime Oliveros García and Alejandro López Lizana



"The Queer Non Sequitur"
Alex Prong



"Gender and Sexuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its Adaptations"
John Rieder



"Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent Mexican Films"
Itala Schmelz



"A young, Black, queer woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monáe and sci-fi queerness"
Erik Steinskog



"Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet Culture"
Dagmar Van Engen



"Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time Travelling Girl"
Candice Wilson and Tobias Wilson-Bates
Part Five, When: Transtemporalities




"Introduction"
Sonja Fritzsche



"Naomi Alderman’s The Power and New Feminist Science Fiction Superheroes"
Marlene S. Barr



"Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia"
Laura Collier and Kathryn Prince



"Science? Fiction? SF by Women in the Magazines"
Jane Donawerth



"Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction"
M. Gulia Fabi



"Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave"
Szilvia Gellai



"The Role of Historical Amnesia and Restorative Nostalgia in The Handmaidʼs Tale Protests: The Limits of the Contemporary White Feminist Dystopian Imagination"
Kate Meakin



"Tracing Second-Wave Feminism through Women in the Dune Series"
Kara Kennedy



"Complicating the Super Man: Evolving Masculinities in US-American Science Fiction"
Michael Pitts



"Between Stove and Emancipation—Conservative Women and Anti-Utopian Imaginations in Early German Science Fiction"
Katharina Scheerer



"‘Mistress of a World’: Margaret Cavendish, Gender, & Science Fiction in Early Modern England"
E. Mariah Spencer



"A Riddle about a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity, and Misrecognition in Adam Robert's Bête"
Jessica Stokes



"The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century"
Mengtian Sun