Course Description 

In this class we will examine gender and science fiction through a feminist lens within historical and contemporary contexts, focusing primarily on American authors. We will investigate the dynamic between female- and male-identifying writers and their characters throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, as well as explore transhuman, posthuman, and alien interpretations of gender. This course will also include more recent texts from nonbinary writers. Some questions we will explore include: how does an author’s identity or culture influence the way they write gender into their stories? What would a “single gender” society look like? How does gender intersect with reproduction in a science fictional setting? Why do authors sometimes veer towards utopia or dystopia when reimagining present-day gender dynamics? This course is designed to build on modern theories of gender and prepare students for advanced scholarship in the fields of literature, media studies, popular culture, and the digital humanities. To facilitate this, we will be studying a variety of written and visual texts using an interdisciplinary framework from genres such as cyberpunk, afrofuturism, indigenous futurism, and others.