Gender and Environment in Science Fiction offers powerful new ways for thinking about the complex intersections between gender and nature, refusing an easy equation of woman=nature=environmentalism. Addressing a range of texts from novels by luminaries such as Mary Shelley and Kim Stanley Robinson, to popular film such as Ex Machina and Mad Max, this volume demonstrates that the connections between gender and the environment are neither obvious or necessarily harmonious. The essays collected here bring disability studies, queer theory, and posthumanism into the conversation, unifying their concerns with sustained attention to the materiality of the body, to offer innovative new perspectives on how science fiction speaks powerful to feminist and environmentalist scholars, and to connections between them.
-- Sherryl Vint, University of California, RiversidePart One: Performing Humanity, Animality, and Gender
Chapter One: Female Beasties: Camp Resistance in 1950s Wom-Animal Creature Features
Bridgitte Barclay
Chapter Two: Either you're mine or you're not mine: Controlling Gender, Nature, and Technology in Her and Ex Machina
Christy Tidwell
Chapter Three: Octavia Butler and the Language of the Flesh: Re-Writing Nature in Wild Seed
Amelia Z. Greene
Part Two: Gendering the Natural World
Chapter Four: Tendrils, Tentacles, and Flower Power: Speciesism in Womaneater (1958) and The Gardener (1974)
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Juan Juve
Chapter Five: So Very Natural an Occurrence: Engendering Nature's Antagonism in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
Steve Asselin
Part Three: Contemporary Queering
Chapter Six: Engineered Nature, (En)gendered Nature in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312
Tyler Harper
Chapter Seven: Ecologies of Sound: Queer Intimacy, Trans-Corporeality, and Reproduction in
Upstream Color
Stina Attebery
Part Four: We Don't Need Another Hero
Chapter Eight: Nature Boys & Bears in Pants: Ecoqueer Hybrid Heroes in Atomic Age Comics
Jill E. Anderson
Chapter Nine: Saving Eden: Whiteness, Masculinity, and Environmental Nostalgia in Soylent Green and WALL-E
Michelle Yates
Chapter Ten: Mad Max: Beyond Petroleum?
Carter Soles