Abstract
In this chapter, Calvin argues that feminist science fiction (FSF) is both a set of characteristics and a process, and while the field of FSF is large and diverse, this chapter defines a particular sub-mode of FSF that emphasizes epistemological concerns. The sub-mode of science fiction, FESF, engages in many of the same concerns as feminist epistemology, including a reimagining of the knowing Subject, a shift in the emphasis on the rational, and an emphasis on the corporeal and concrete.
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Notes
- 1.
Attebery is hardly alone in defining SF as a set of practices. See, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977/2011), Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), and Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal (2009).
- 2.
In Parabolas of Science Fiction (2013), Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger make a similar argument. They suggest that science fiction has no essence, but, rather, is a “way of using texts and drawing relationships among them” (v).
- 3.
On the other hand, in an award-winning essay, “On Defining SF, or Not” (2010), John Rieder takes a decidedly anti-Suvian approach.
- 4.
In zher essay “Things Made Strange” (2008), Simon Spiegel examines Suvin’s flexible and inconsistent use of the term “estrangement.” Spiegel suggests that Suvin does not mean the same kind of “estrangement” that Shlovsky and Brecht meant; instead, zhe suggests that Suvin intends a “diegetic estrangement,” or “the collision of contradicting elements on the level of story” (375).
- 5.
Those works that introduce a novum into the topology (place, objects) can manifest in either the physical location or in discoveries (gadgets). The former option tends to either explore the details of an imagined, alternate world, or examine the relationship of humans within the created world. Suvin tends to dismiss the fourth category as a weird, deformed form of science fantasy.
- 6.
Jenny Wolmark echoes this argument in zher essay “Time and Identity in Feminist Science Fiction”: “In common with other forms of popular fiction, feminist SF contains contradictory responses to the dominant ideology in the sense that it is both complicit with and critical of that ideology” (156).
- 7.
As Helen Merrick (The Secret Feminist Cabal) and Justine Larbalestier (The Battle of the Sexes) demonstrate in their cultural histories of science fiction, these concerns were hardly news. However, they completed extensive archival research in order to put them all together. In the “Introduction” to zher collection of fiction, Sargent offers zher evaluation to a popular audience.
- 8.
To be sure, the anxieties take different forms in different cultures. For example, the anxieties about alien invasion so common in US science fiction were far less common in British science fiction of the same time.
- 9.
For more on the development and issues of the New Wave, see Colin Greenland’s The Entropy Exhibition (1983/2013), Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (2007), and Rob Latham’s essay, “The New Wave,” in David Seed’s A Companion to Science Fiction (2008).
- 10.
The argument that science fiction as a genre is inherently conservative is also noted by Robin Roberts in A New Species (1–2). Roberts also argues that “[o]nly in science fiction” can feminist writers “step outside the father’s house and begin to look around” (2), a claim that grants a little too much power to genre writing.
- 11.
The book appeared as Feminism and Science Fiction in the USA.
- 12.
In zher review essay, “An Elaborate Suggestion,” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. challenges McHale’s use of the concept of the “ontological dominant” (461–64).
- 13.
Here, I look at monographs; the question of essays on feminist science fiction takes a slightly different trajectory.
- 14.
One sign or symptom of the alteration of the codes of science fiction would be the 2015 Hugo ballot controversy, in which two groups of individuals, self-described as the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, objected to the changes in the field brought about by the “Social Justice Warriors.” For further explanation and context, see Kameron Hurley’s essay in The Atlantic (2015).
- 15.
In Toward a Feminist Epistemology, Duran sets out the history of analytical epistemology, more or less along the lines as I have done above (though in more detail). One of zher primary concerns, however, is also to introduce some of the counternarratives within the field of epistemology. While the bulk of the Western tradition has, indeed, focused upon a disembodied knower and normative articulations of the grounds of possibility for claims to knowledge, others within the field have begun to develop the possibilities of embodied socially situated knowledge. According to Duran, these developments are the result of extant discussion within philosophical epistemology as well as new developments within the cognitive sciences, among which Duran includes the fields of “psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer simulation, and computer science” (35), all of which arose or flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As Alvin Goldman clearly expresses in an article from 1978, epistemology ought to take advantage of “cognitive psychology” (qtd. in Duran 45). Consequently, (some) epistemologists begin to consider (or even emphasize) “the social features of knowledge” (48). These newly emerging trends within epistemology are “naturalized” theories of knowledge rather than “normative.”
- 16.
Another form of knowledge is “testimonial knowledge.” See Linda Martín Alcoff’s “On Judging Epistemic Credibility” (1999), Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007), and Lorraine Code’s “Testimony, Advocacy, Ignorance” (2010).
- 17.
This kind of acquaintance knowledge certainly overlaps with propositional knowledge. When I state that my sister’s or the president’s birthday is such-and-such a day, I am also making a propositional claim.
- 18.
This summary vastly simplifies the formulation of propositional claims, particularly since the Gettier problems (1963) complicated the field. Edmund Gettier offered several simple cases in which the Subject was not justified in zher belief. For example, a man walks down the stairs in the morning and looks at the clock in order to see what time it is. Zhe has every reason to assume that the clock has the right time. Zhe’s had the clock for a long time, and it has always been correct. So, if the clock says that it is 7:15 in the morning, and if it is actually 7:15, then zhe is justified in zher belief. Therefore, zhe “knows” that it is 7:15. But suppose that one particular morning, zhe walks down the stairs, and unbeknownst to zher, the power has gone out, and the clock has stopped. Zhe now reads the clock for the time, and zhe is justified in zher belief, but zhe is actually wrong. Zhe lacks knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is not, or is not simply, justified true belief.
- 19.
Lorraine Code provides a number of examples, including Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and von Humboldt (“Is” 268). Simone de Beauvoir provides a similar accounting in The Second Sex.
- 20.
Code herself notes that zhe often conflates and interchanges the terms sex and gender in zher discussion of epistemology. In some cases, both the traditional and feminist philosophers are, indeed, discussing the physical, biological, sexual differences between males and females. In other cases, they are clearly discussing social, cultural, and political gender differences between men and women. While Code opts, for the sake of both convenience and tradition, to use the term sex, I will attempt to specify the differences between sex and gender.
- 21.
In this initial essay, Code rejects (all too quickly, I would suggest) weight or body shape as epistemically significant factors in determining knowledge. For example, zhe suggests that we do not consider Archimedes’s weight when we consider and evaluate zher discovery of the theory of displacement (267). Instead, zhe notes that the “fact of being male or being female seems to be fundamental to one’s way of being a person in such a way that it could have a strong influence upon one’s way of knowing” (267–68). However, in Ecological Thinking (2006), Code notes that zhe had been “naïve” in zher universalized knowing Subject. Instead, zhe writes, “The picture I now present is of an epistemic subjectivity and agency socially-culturally learned and practiced” (viii).
- 22.
Grosz writes that, for Aristotle, “[R]eason is still based on it. If it does not consist in abstraction, which distances the particular from the universal, … he advocates an instrumental or pragmatic intelligence as well” (“Philosophy” 156). Here, Aristotle suggests a sort of “intelligence” for material things, but, if they are not in propositional form, zhe does not consider them knowledge.
- 23.
The question of the “idealized” is also contentious. While feminist epistemologists, particularly feminist standpoint epistemologists, want to reject the idealized would-be knower of traditional S-knows-that-p epistemology, critics of feminist standpoint epistemologists suggest that they have merely substituted one idealized Subject for another—“woman” or “African-American woman,” for example.
- 24.
The shift is also evident in the discussions of “testimonial” knowledge; however, for the purposes of this study of feminist science fiction, testimonial knowledge is less relevant.
- 25.
In zher monograph Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (1990), Lynn Hankinson Nelson makes a similar case for a refinement of empiricism and of the scientific method in order to produce a better science and a better accounting of the world.
- 26.
However, a number of feminist critics have challenged the body as a site of knowledge production and validation. For more on this, see Judith Grant, “I Feel Therefore I Am”; Susan Haack, “Knowledge and Propaganda”; or Elspeth Probyn, “This Body Which Is Not One.” In “Refiguring Bodies,” Elizabeth Grosz argues that feminists who offer the body as a site of knowledge have fallen into the same dichotomous trap as their masculinist predecessors by assuming that the mind and body are separate.
- 27.
This particular emphasis will have little effect in the following examples of FESF—which is not to say that it might not apply in some forms of FSF.
- 28.
In that statement, Jefferson also excludes “infants” until they reach the “years of discretion” and “slaves” who do not have the “right of will and of property” (46).
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Calvin, R. (2016). Chapter One Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology. In: Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32470-8_2
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