Guiding Questions:
If science fiction is a genre that imagines our future, what happens to gender and
race?
1.Vivian Sobchack, Love machines: boy toys, toy boys and the oxymorons of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, http://www.sendspace.com/file/j21ut3
This article explores both the joke and the tragic fate of two culturally significant robots—one a ‘boy toy’ and the other a ‘toy boy’ – jointly conceived to matter by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). These ‘love machines’ are designed to enact male performative desire for a woman but dramatize two quite contradictory masculine visions of our displaced technological existence: one a hard-bodied ‘Sex machine’, the other vulnerable and impotent.
The robots’ seeming binary opposition comes into complementary conjunction and confusion in A.I. – and says something important (and sad) about the contemporary American technological (and male) imagination and its irreconcilable and irresolute visions of what, in both cases, seems an inevitably inhuman future. This is a future presently conceived as always already past and expressed in acts of mourning and nostalgia: a ‘forever after’ in which male bodies (and, by extension, all human beings) are figured as abandoned, hollowed out, in pieces – and then memorialized long after they have actually vanished from the face of the earth.
A.I.’s mournful narrative of a future-past says something significant about what is perceived as an impossible future-present. Stewart writes “the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object. Hence A.I.’s memory belongs to a robot. Suspended between an ironic Kubrickian critique of technological man and his Spielbergian redemption, A.I. merges and confuses its contradictions to become a failed masterwork that cannot reconcile its male bodies.
2. Patrick B. Sharp, Darwin’s soldiers Gender, evolution and warfare in Them! And Forbidden Planet, http://www.sendspace.com/file/f0i7l0
This article examines the difference in representation of the roles women should play in the military and in their attitudes toward violent evolutionary masculinity in the classic 1950s science fiction films Them!(1954) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
Them! and Forbidden Planet presented a vision of fighting men as evolutionary heroes who save women and protect civilization from the dangers brought about by nuclear technologies. Both films thus recirculate long-standing narratives about the relationship between masculinity, warfare and technology, but at the same time offer perspectives on the dangers inherent in masculine uses of technology. These films’ complexity is most evident in the ways in which their narratives diverge sharply regarding what kind of support role women could play in the armed forces.
Both Them! and Forbidden Planet utilize evolutionary plots to warn against the dangers of nuclear technologies and explore the horrors of the nuclear age.
However, they come to starkly different conclusions about gender and the mi lit a y. Though critical of atomic testing, Them! represents the masculine military as a solution to the monsters produced by the nuclear age. While Forbidden Planet fore grounds the classic evolutionary romance plot that represents women as a threat to civilized masculine order: men are the only ones capable of contributing to the mi litary in a positive way. In both films, males are the only ones fit to be soldiers engaging in violent conflict on the battlefield.
3. Dee Amy-Chinn,Rose Tyler: The ethics of care and the limit of agency,
http://www.sendspace.com/file/oo8bkm
This article uses British science fiction Star Maidens series as an analysis, attempt to talk about the series’ absence from critical histories of British television and British science fiction and read the series from a feminist perspective in relation to contemporary gender issues. The author argues that the history of British science fiction television that has largely ignored this women-centre series.
The author analyses the content of the series such as music, mise-en-scene, costumes and actors. The series premise is clearly concerned with gender and the status of women in relation to the cultural moment of the 1970s. The context of this series is about a female-dominated planet, Medusa. Female are superior and male are inferior in the planet. The series concludes by narrating the dangers of feminists and feminism: because women are by nature unable to fight while men are naturally aggressive, feminism can lead to the inevitable destruction of society. However, the series are being ignored when broadcasting. It is because the female dominated texts are not popular for audience. It had given the series’ logic of gender inversion. The author believes that the complicated gendered rhetoric of Star Maidens demonstrates the value of including the series in histories of British science fiction television. Star Maidens makes strange and reinforces patriarchal values. Although the series is dominated by women, it is not a feminist text.
4. Sharon Sharp, Star Maidens: gender and science fiction in the 1970s,
http://www.sendspace.com/file/or0w5v
This article uses feminist moral theory to explore the UK science fiction television program Doctor Who. The author concentrate on the character Rose, and she believes that in contrast to the action heroine. She argues that acts of care, when carried out by women, limit agency and restrict the growth of the characters that embody them in this context.
The author analyses the program through various perspectives. The author believes that Rose’s agency is gendered and limited in ways that restrict her ability to be such a heroine. The author argues that Rose can be a heroine but her ability is not born. The male character always has high ability than all female characters. Some feminist believes that Rose is limited not only by her ability to care, but by her inability to act. Rose is not like the male character has “special” ability. Although Doctor Who did attempt to negotiate the changing role of women who with limited success, overall the gendered discourse of the show is problematic with regard to the consequences of the forms of available female agency. The show continues to rely on a hierarchy of genders. So, the author believes that the states of women have no change.
5. Janani Subramanian, Alienating identification: Black identity in The Brother from Another Planet and I Am Legend,
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B7U7VGZ4h5TXMDA0OWRlMjYtMThiYi00NzRlLTljMWEtYTJiMDM4OTU0MTY2&hl=en
This article explores and compares the protagonist’s status in two different science fiction films which are The Brother from Another Planet (Sayles US 1984)and Sayles’ film, I Am Legend (Lawrence US 2007). Both of them complicate representations of black identity in their specific relationships to social and historical contexts. The Brother from Another Planet is about the protagonist as both extraterrestrial and black man lends insight into the black citizen’s relationship to an alienating urban environment in Reagan-era retreat from federal government support for inner cities. I Am Legend is about racial implications of a lone black protagonist in a post-9/11 apocalyptic landscape. This film does raise the questions that politics of black identity.
The term ‘alienation’ is an important concept in this article. The author analyses the narratives of race and identity in these two films through the theories of alienation. It is always relate to science fiction and fantasy, genres which set out to alienate viewers and readers from their own worlds. Thus, provide critical perspectives on familiar yet exotic environments or futures.
The author analyses the content of this two films. The author argues that science fiction films act as a valuable testing ground. If the aliens live in our world, what happen to them? Does their identity same as human? And does they identifier though race? From these two films, the author believes that the orientation move away from traditional value of representation which associated black identity with a history of degradation and the lack of a future. The Brother from Another Planet, a film that engages with the economic and political disenfranchisement of a black urban population. I Am Legend requires people to negotiate the competing notions of blackness. And the heroes’ image of Will Smiths demonstrates a similar change in the cultural values of blackness.
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