Science Fiction
Phyllis M. Betz’s The lesbian fantastic looks like the sort of criticism that quietly opens a side door into a much better room.
I’m always interested when SF and gothic get treated as neighbours rather than separate departments with stern labels on the door. The idea that lesbian writers used those forms to work through otherness feels like the kind of argument that can change what you notice on the shelf afterwards. Which is, frankly, the point of criticism. Otherwise it’s just furniture.
I’m always interested when SF and gothic get treated as neighbours rather than separate departments with stern labels on the door. The idea that lesbian writers used those forms to work through otherness feels like the kind of argument that can change what you notice on the shelf afterwards. Which is, frankly, the point of criticism. Otherwise it’s just furniture.
Halfway through, and the bit that keeps sticking with me is how criticism can make genre feel less like a box and more like a set of tools. That matters with SF in particular, because people still talk about it as if it arrived fully formed from a single shelf.
I’m interested in the gothic angle too. That overlap usually gets flattened, when really it’s where the odd, the hidden and the socially inconvenient tend to do their best work.
I’m interested in the gothic angle too. That overlap usually gets flattened, when really it’s where the odd, the hidden and the socially inconvenient tend to do their best work.