Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology - Four Modes

This book argues that feminist science fiction shares the same concerns as feminist epistemology-challenges to the sex of the knower, the valuation of the abstract over the concrete, the dismissal of the physical, the focus on rationality and reason, the devaluation of embodied knowledge, and the containment of (some) bodies. Ritch Calvin argues that feminist science fiction asks questions of epistemology because those questions are central to making claims of subjectivity and identity. Calvin reveals how women, who have historically been marginal to the deliberations of philosophy and science, have made significant contributions to the reconsideration and reformulation of the epistemological models of the world and the individuals in it.



Ritch Calvin is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at SUNY, Stony Brook, USA. He is the editor of Gilmore Girls and the Politics of Identity, the co-editor of SF 101: An Introduction to Science Fiction, and has published work in Extrapolation, Femspec, Science Fiction Film and Television, Science Fiction Studies, and Utopian Studies. He served six years on the SFRA Executive Committee and as the SFRA Review's media reviews editor.