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This project applies critical media and gender theories to the relatively unexplored social space where technology and subjectivity meet. Taking popular film as a form of public pedagogy, the project implicates unquestioned structures of patriarchal control in shaping the development and depiction of robotic bodies. The project was spurred from a decline in critical discourse surrounding technology’s potential to upset binaried gender constructions, and the increasingly simplified depictions of female-shaped robots (gynoids) as proxies for actual women. By critically engaging assumptions of gender when applied to technology, the project recontextualizes fundamental theories in contemporary popular film. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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This dissertation explores the ways that women authors of science fiction have altered conventions of utopia and science fiction in order to revise conceptions of gender, sexuality, the body, and the environment. I examine several twentieth-century feminist critical dystopias that continue to betray genre and form, and to shape the science fiction being written at this moment. Each of the works demonstrates particular elements that facilitate its revisionary power: challenging and deconstructing sex/gender systems, blending utopian and dystopian conventions, and engaging in temporal play. By doing so they accomplish a range of tasks: disrupting generic and historical conventions, blending genres, redefining utopia, and making connections with present realities in order to make a case for social change, particularly for female and queer subjects. Though many of the texts are considered canonical by sf standards, and have been widely praised and critiqued in academic publications, each one continues its project of resistance in the light of the genre and of ever-evolving theories of gender, sexuality, race, and identity. As a scholar of gender and queer theory, I find within sf an extraordinary realm of potential for those willing to challenge norms and imagine new possibilities. In their rejection of system and form, the authors render impure the genre of science fiction, providing a new space in which utopian ideals can become literary and cultural resistance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 15, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-223).

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Thèse en cotutelle, Université Laval, Québec, Canada, Philosophiæ doctor (Ph. D.) et Université Rennes 2, Rennes, France. / À partir des années 1950, la science-fiction anglophone arrive en France. La découverte de cette littérature de divertissement stimule une réflexion commune aux amateurs de ce nouveau genre et aux futurs nouveaux romanciers sur les possibles du romanesque. De même, la diffusion du Nouveau Roman contamine la science-fiction. La crise que le roman connaît au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale transparait dans les questionnements que se posent les écrivains de science-fiction au cours des années 1960, aussi bien en France qu'en Grande-Bretagne. Cette étude vise ainsi à mettre en évidence les relations entre le Nouveau Roman et la science-fiction entre 1950 et 2006. À partir des œuvres d'Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Ollier et Jean Ricardou, mais aussi celles de Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard et des membres du groupe Limite, il s'agit d'analyser la nature de ces relations. D'une part, une connaissance mutuelle émerge grâce aux traductions des uns et des autres dans les champs français et anglais. Les auteurs se lisent, se citent, ce qui leur permet de développer un méta-discours sur leur propre pratique. De l'autre, l'écriture avant-gardiste du Nouveau Roman semble offrir les conditions d'une expérimentation pour les auteurs de science-fiction britannique et français. Il en ressort une réflexion sur la désignation générique mais aussi sur la modernité romanesque au sens large. La science-fiction prend conscience de sa littérarité et se fait une place dans le champ artistique. / English-language science fiction arrived in France in the 1950s. The discovery of this entertaining literature stimulated fans of the new genre and future new novelists to reflect on the possibilities of the novel. Likewise, the spread of the Nouveau Roman contaminated science fiction. The crisis facing the novel in the aftermath of the Second World War was reflected in the questions raised by science fiction writers in the 1960s, both in France and in Great Britain. The aim of this study is to highlight the relationship between the New Novel and science fiction between 1950 and 2006. Using the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Ollier and Jean Ricardou, as well as those of Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and members of the group named Limite, we analyze the nature of these relationships. On the one hand, a mutual knowledge emerges thanks to each other's translations in the French and English fields. The authors read and quote each other, enabling them to develop a meta-discourse on their own practice. On the other hand, the avant-garde writing of the Nouveau Roman seems to offer the conditions for experimentation for British and French science fiction writers. What emerges is a reflection on generic designation, but also on novelistic modernity in the broadest sense. Science fiction is becoming aware of its literarity and is carving out a place for itself in the artistic field.