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Body Parts: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Short Stories by Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jane Donawerth
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Abstract

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 3: Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium , May 2004 , pp. 474 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

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