Literature
Women writers have played key roles in science fiction and fantasy literature, often addressing themes of gender. One of the first writers of science fiction was Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein (1818) dealt with the asexual creation of new life, a re-telling of the Adam and Eve story.
Women writers in the utopian literature movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the time of first wave feminism, often addressed sexism. The Sultana's Dream (1905) by Bengali Muslim feminist, Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, points this out through depicting a gender-reversed purdah in an alternate and technologically futuristic world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did so by creating a single-sex world in Herland (1915). During the 1920s writers such as Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows Bennett published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and occasionally dealt with gender and sexuality based topics. Meanwhile, much pulp science fiction published during 1920s and 1930s carried an exaggerated view of masculinity along with sexist portrayals of women, a view subtly satirized by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (1932).
By the 1960s science fiction was combining sensationalism with political and technological critiques of society. With the advent of second wave feminism, women’s roles were questioned in this "subversive, mind expanding genre." Three notable texts of this period are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970). Each highlights the socially constructed aspects of gender roles by creating worlds with genderless societies. Both authors were pioneers in feminist criticism of science fiction during the 1960s and 70s through essays collected in The Language of the Night (Le Guin, 1979) and How To Suppress Women's Writing (Russ, 1983).
Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (1985) tells a dystopic tale of a society in which women have been systematically stripped of all liberty, and was motivated by fear of potential retrogressive effects on women's rights stemming from the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s. Octavia Butler poses complicated questions about the nature of race and gender in Kindred (1979).
By the 1970s the science fiction community was confronting questions of feminism and sexism within science fiction culture itself. Multiple Hugo-winning fan writer and professor of literature Susan Wood and others organized the "feminist panel" at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention against considerable resistance. Reactions to the appearance of feminists among fannish ranks led indirectly to the creation of A Women's APA and WisCon.
Feminist science fiction is sometimes taught at the university level to explore the role of social constructs in understanding gender.
Read more about this topic: Feminist Science Fiction
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