4. If science fiction is a genre that imagines our future, what happens to gender and race? (you can apply this question to literary of cinematic sf)
As Joseph Marchesani discusses in his article Science Fiction and Fantasy, the constructions of both gender and sexuality in science fiction are and have been replicated, and rarely challenged. Marchensani goes on to critcise how, as a genre, science fiction remains to include the same characters in texts over and over again. Marchensani examines many different authors, discussing how a genre like science fiction, with its “promise (of) more freedom than.. nongenre literatures” has the option to “imagine alternatives to the privileged assumptions of heterosexuality and masculinity that suffuse our culture”. Marchensani goes through the history of science fiction and fantasy writing to try and explain how such a free genre of writing constructed such stereotypes, and found that from boys' adventure stories of the late Nineteenth Century, the move toward “more easily accessible stereotypes” was made.
"Science fiction... is more hyperbolically concerned... with the question of difference... the politics of race and sexual orientation”. Constance Penley openly discusses how although science fiction seems to merge gender and race, it also excludes it. People tend to see science fiction as a genre that is “typically posed as that of the difference between the human and the nonhuman”, however, Penley is concerned with the differences and the exclusions it assumes through presenting the same white males.
Penley refers to science fiction's fascination with the mother, and the body of the mother in regards to questions of reproduction and the representation of the maternal. The constant and ever changing depiction of the cyborg/alien/monster/robot which is consciously and unconsciously constructing new categories of “masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity, through the shifting, ambiguous, and contradictory sexual status” it gives this cyborg/alien/monster/robot.
Mary Ann Doane examines the films Aliens and Blade Runner in reference to gender in science fiction and, much like Penley, discovered profound anxieties in regards to the female body and its ability to reproduce, and create unscripted life. Doane found that the discussion of the feminine/maternal was one of the underlying constructs of both films. While reviewing Aliens, Doane found that the use of technology, as opposed to biology reproducing gender challenged concepts of what it means to be human, to be gendered, as the decision of gender in humans today does not lie in anybody's hands, while, obviously it does technologically."In the case of some science fiction.. technology makes possible the destabilisation of sexual identity as a category, there has also been a ...history of representations of technology which work to fortify- sometimes desperately- conventional understandings of the feminine” (Doane). Doane also identifies the constant tension between the potential for liberation and the tendency for it to be reproduces in science fiction by reinforcing gendered and racialised stereotypes.
Sarah Zettel, a science fiction and fantasy writer herself, sees the portrayal of gender and race in science fiction much like Doane, Penley and Marchesani. Although a conscious or unconscious attempt has been made to remove it from science fiction, Zettel sees the constant differences in science fiction texts for more historical reasons.
As context has a great influence on writers, the time of which something was written often reflects beliefs and values of the time. Zettel, while reviewing these 'things that don't go away', notices historically, that the longest running fiction magazine Astounding Stories, under the name Analog Science Fiction, which printed science fiction had, and to this day may still have strict guidelines. In order to be printed in the magazine, “you could not have a name that was female, or too 'foreign'” (Zettel). So Catherine Moore was to became C.L. Moore, take a male pseudonym or not be published. The ability for the press to control race and gender in this way also implies that the content of the texts would too be gender and racially controlled.
While many more guidelines stood in the way of free writing (for Astounding Stories, anyway) Zettel notes that other publications eventually led to accept female writers, and that there was a “small but existent body of science fiction literature in the African American press.
Elizabeth Bear, another female science fiction author, sees, from a writers' perspective, the ease of creating a niche in which a writer presents the same characters the same ways in science fiction. The portrayal of gender and race in science fiction is, obviously, down to the writer and she came up with guidelines to ensure that the inclusion of 'The Other', a term Bear uses for non white, American males, is represented, and not seen as 'The Other'. An interesting approach, as Bear wants a diversity of characters, but can only refer to them as 'The Other', as they have yet to be properly represented.
Bear writes about the same repetitive white male characters presented in science fiction, and goes on to say “stop thinking about this person you're writing as The Other. Think of them as human, an individual. Not A Man. Not A Woman. Not A Chinese Person or A Handicapped Person or A Person With Cancer or a Queer Person. A person. Stop trying to make them universal” (Bear).
References:
Bear, Elizabeth, “Throw another Bear in the Canoe” <http://matociquala.
Doane, Mary Ann, “Technophilia” <www.yorku.ca/jjenson/
Penley, Constance et al “Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction” <http://books.google.com.au/
Marcesani, Joseph, “Science Fiction and Fantasy” <http://www.glbtq.com/
Zettel, Sarah, “Things That Don't Go Away: Race and Science Fiction” <http://www.bscreview.com/
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