THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES IN SCIENCE FICTION: FROM THE PULPS TO THE JAMES TIPTREE, JR. MEMORIAL AWARD

In this thesis I argue that science fiction is not a genre exclusively made up of written texts but a community or series of communities. I examine the science fiction community's engagement with questions of femeninity, masculinity, sex and sexuality over the past seventy years, that is from 1926 until 1996. My examination of this engagement is centred on the battle of the sexes, the lives of James Tiptree, Jr. and the Award named in Tiptree's honour. I make connections between contemporary feminist science fiction and the earliest pulp science fiction engagements with sex and sexuality

Reading sleep through science fiction : the parable of beggars and choosers

This article examines the iconic 'Beggars' trilogy by feminist science fiction writer, Nancy Kress. These novels, produced in the early to mid-1990s, take as their 'thought experiment' two points of rupture and contemporary cultural contestation: the advent of human genetic engineering and sleep, or, more specifically, the prospect of a sleepless society. I shall begin by situating my analysis of the Kress trilogy in this nexus of fields. I shall consider the interest of Kress's works for the sociology of sleep as well as for a cultural analysis of science. In this context, and drawing in part on the work of Haran, I will suggest the particular value of science fiction as not only a site for, but also a source of, narrativized social theory. I shall introduce the notion of popular episteme as an analytic concept that aims to link the discursive to the social - that is, to theorize the relationship of textuality to materiality. I shall refer also to the psychoanalytic concept of 'phantasy' as a point of convergence for both structures of feeling and structures of knowledge. I shall then introduce the Kress works, focusing particularly on the first novel Beggars in Spain, locating it in a period in which feminist science fiction saw a marked renaissance, and in which speculative theorizations of genetics formed a distinct subgenre. The analysis will then focus on three core themes emergent in the novels that, I shall argue, have profound contemporaneous resonance. These are the questions of: embodied capital; the political economy of what I will term fast time; and paranoia and the human condition