Infertility in science fiction as a feminist issue

Abstract

ALTHOUGH MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURES such as the Amazonian female warrior might encourage us to think that feminism is as old as mythology, feminism as a political stance through which the personal came to be perceived as political and which highlighted patriarchal structures and ideology as systematically making the female of the human species seem inferior to the male, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Despite some important 19th century works, we can claim that feminism as a political and critical movement came into its own after WWII. Literary feminism brings together a range of approaches to textual analysis. These include the critique of patriarchal language and tropes, addressing the historical disappearance of women writers, the authorial voice of women, and the increasing presence of women in the canon and in genres formally dominated by male writers. Some of these approaches, such as Marxist Feminism, have privileged the realist novel as a locus of analysis and have delved into the relationship between literature and life, perceiving representation of women, attitudes towards women, and the language of the text as reflective of socially constructed gender-biased attitudes between the sexes at various historical moments.