Date Thesis Awarded
5-2024
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Advisor
Erin Webster
Committee Members
Keith Johnson
Alicia Andrzejewski
Claire McKinney
Abstract
Modern science fiction has seen an increase in reproductive fiction, particularly feminist reproductive fiction, but this has not always been the case. Science fiction has been called “a traditionally masculine territory” (Booker 337), which its social and academic history can attest to. Previous scholarship on science fiction has centered the work of a few key male authors, and ignored, with the exception of figures like Atwood, Le Guin, and Butler, large swaths of science fiction by feminist authors like Judith Merril. Within the source material itself, most previous explorations of reproduction have centered male perspectives, highlighting reproduction as a broad social phenomena and the origin of male main characters, often depicted in relation to technology as a source of repression and detachment from the natural world. These works may also discuss infertility or mass extinction as major issues in future worlds, but ultimately fail to account for the individual lives of pregnant people associated with these broader trends and problems. If one considers the idea that “social science fiction has the potential to become a cultural epistemology” (Gerlach and Hamilton 164), the absence of feminist perspectives on these subjects in science fiction canon and scholarship becomes a glaring social issue as well as an intellectual one. In order to address this gap in scholarship, this paper seeks to explore four examples of contemporary feminist science fiction, The Growing Season, The Echo Wife, Dreams Before the Start of Time, and The Mother Code, that engage with the subject of reproduction in order to evaluate how these works develop feminist thought, present potential futures, and provide insights into the modern feminist project through their projection of political realities into fictional landscapes.
Recommended Citation
Mullet, Amanda, "Feminist Realizations of Assisted Reproductive Technology in Contemporary Science Fiction" (2024). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2139.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/2139
