Department of English

Women invented speculative fiction in English – and from Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley down to Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Octavia Butler, women writers have generated speculative fictions that have profoundly shaped the genre’s concerns with gender, sexuality, embodiment, and reproduction. Women’s bodies have also been among scifi’s most persistent objects of analysis, in film and television from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. This course will explore these concerns in literature, television, and film through the guiding question of the genre: the speculative what if? that gives these stories their imaginative and political power.  Assignments will include weekly blog posts, three short analytical essays, and a final creative project.