The Planetary Humanism of European Womens Science Fiction

This book offers rare insight into how utopian science fiction written by contemporary and historical European women has played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination.

The Planetary Humanism of European Women's Science Fiction argues that utopian science fiction written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination.

This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett's Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani's Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard's Xuya Universe series; Elia Barcelo's Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro. It sets these in conversation with key gender and critical race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti- racism, and science fiction now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions.

Offering unique access to contemporary and historical women writers who have mobilised the utopian imagination to rethink the human, this book is of use to those conducting research in Gender Studies, Philosophy, History, and Literature.

Autorentext

Eleanor Drage is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she applies feminism and anti- racism to the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Inhalt

Introduction and Roadmap Chapter 1: Towards New Forms of Humanism Chapter 2: Contextualising the History of SF Chapter 3: Re-historicising the Future: Re-contextualising Systems of Race and Gender in Women's SF Chapter 4: Embodying New Forms of Humanism: The Fate of Race and Gender in Queer Assemblages Chapter 5: Pregnancy, by Mistake: Transgressing Race and Gender Through Queered Extraterrestrial Fertility Chapter 6: Non-Reproductive Planetary Communities: Race, Gender, Kinship, and Forgetting to Conform Chapter 7: At the Borders of the Planetary Chapter 8: Conclusion. New Forms of Humanism Summaries of Primary SF Texts. Index