(Re)productive fictions

reproduction, embodiment and feminist science in Marge Piercy's science fiction

Joan Haran

pp. 154-168

in: Karen Sayer, John Moore (eds), Science fiction, critical frontiers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is "informed by the feminist, socialist and radical politics that developed during the 1960s and 1970s' (Lefanu, 1988, p. 3). There were women writing science fiction much earlier, but the body of work labelled feminist science fiction burgeoned hand-in-hand with second-wave feminism. Lefanu states that The stock conventions of science fiction … can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of "woman"" (ibid., p. 5), and Wolmark concurs, noting that 'significant convergence between feminism and science fiction since the 1970s … has resulted in the production of texts in which gender and identity are central, as is the depiction of new and different sets of social and sexual relations' (Wolmark, 1993, p. 1).