Women have written their way out of powerlessness at least since the French scholar and writer Christine de Pizan produced The Book of the City of Ladies in the early 15th century. The work, the focus of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time last week, defended mythological and historical female figures from Zenobia to the Queen of Sheba, extracting them from the torrent of misogyny threatening to overwhelm the narratives they inhabited. But science fiction, as a genre, is especially adept at challenging the balance of power between the sexes, for its job is to ask the question “what if?”, and it has, as such, frequently been the site of pointed societal critique.
Feminist theorists, influenced by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, have long seen in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a disturbing meditation on motherhood, the female body, and the act of (female) creation. In a less occluded manner Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her 1915 utopian novel Herland, imagined a scenario in which a group of American explorers stumble upon a remote people – a peaceful, prosperous, wise society made up entirely of women, the equilibrium of which the men threaten with their galumphing lubriciousness.
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2rjKfpg
0 comments:
Post a Comment