Ashby, Madeline. 'Ownership, authority and the body: does antifanfic sentiment represent posthuman anxiety?'
This article compares portrayals of the technological creator in science fiction with the role of the literary author. In films like Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell, the creator owns and takes steps to control the body of his creations, and these creations struggle with that control. This narrative can be used to provide perspective to the debate over ownership of characters. Authors such as Robin Hobb and Lee Goldberg have contested that their creations, the characters in their books, are being inappropriately abused by unauthorised writers. These characters, once published, are malleable, transformed by fans to create cyborgs, creatures who are endlessly replicated and varied. Their bodies, transformed within fanfiction to include wings, male pregnancy, homosexual attraction and genderswap, to name a few, are controlled by a multitude of fans as well as the original author. In exercising control over these imagined bodies, fans, predominantly woman, have an avenue to their own empowerment, and this avenue is contested by those threatened by the loss of authorial ownership. This empowerment is sometimes achieved by overlaying the anxieties and experiences of the fan onto the body of the character, and using that body as a vehicle to both tell their own story and imagine their own potential futures. The imagined cyborgs of the future are already here, being fought over by various interests, in a way that showcases existing power dynamics. The authors who want to keep their creations to themselves highlight the perversity of competing interests, criticising the expression of female desire.
Coppa, Francesca. 'Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding'
This article provides an optimistic account of a counter-culture history that allows women to engage with technology and with female narratives through the use of video editing. In the context of Mulvey's male gaze, and the male domination of film production, science fiction and technology, women have managed to create their own stories by the use of remix culture. Star Trek imagines our future, but from the perspective of the male creators, for an audience with certain gender expectations. As such the imagined future is one that replicates and reinforces existing gender dynamics, and therefore one that marginalizes other experiences. Coppa argues that at the heart of Star Trek is a displaced woman, Number One, and that the problematic female portrayal was a call to arms. The fans, incapable of providing a competing future in the same format, managed to use the technology they did have at their disposal, VCRs, to produce alternative readings of the future that others had envisaged. The fans discussed were technically adept and highly educated, and engaged with the text in a way that united technology with female desire. This expression of female desire forms the basis of many of the criticisms leveled at fan culture, as described by Ashby. This is one reason that fan culture can be described as revolutionary and empowering for the women involved - it is a forum where community support and the anonymity of the internet allows for female desire, the expression of which is still unpopular in mainstream culture. While vidding has become more popular with easier video-editing software and more accessible with online streaming websites, and therefore not all vids can be placed in this narrative of revolutionary expression, Coppa firmly places early remix culture within minority discourses. With this in mind, there has been more recent acceptance that remix culture also needs to engage with the issue of representations of characters of colour, and much discussion as to how to do so. Coppa mentions How Much is that Geisha in the Window, a vid that engages with the whitewashing of the future, where remix culture is used to point out that Firefly is a show that imagines a space-faring future based on the US and China being the superpowers, yet because it is imagined by a white creator, it doesn't actually show a world that includes Asian characters as anything other than scenery.
Hollinger, Veronica. 'The Technobody and its Discontents.'
A literature review that discusses the way that gender remains a “vigilantly guarded border concept” even though speculative fiction could reimagine any aspect of the future. It discusses the link between body and identity, and that “bodies are always gendered and marked by race.” Hollinger investigates the literature claims that despite the promised blurring between body and self "the discourses of cyber culture... work to enforce the kinds of boundaries which it promises to erase forever." It also focuses on the importances of the shape of our imagined futures. "Popular culture," it quotes, “is the testbed of our futurity,” and the culture wars over these imagined futures is indeed a war over our actual future. This is why I believe remix culture is so important, in that it provides a vehicle for commentary on popular culture, science fiction and essentially, commentary on the type of future that we want to be heading towards.
Merick, Helen. 'We was cross-dressing 'afore you were born! Or, how sf fans invented virtual community'
A history of science-fiction fan communities, and the role of gender within them. This article can be used to show the role of gender and authenticity within virtual fan communities. This article talks of the pride that women took in a female-produced fan publication, despite the fact that one of the co-editors was secretly a man. Science fiction is not only a way of imagining the future, but also a way of engaging with an aspect of present culture. This shared interest in present culture, and the desire for community out of that shared interest has led to ongoing engagement with evolving technologies, shaping society's cultural future.
Nixon, Nicola. 'Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?'
A gendered critique of cyberpunk that deconstructs the revolutionary hyperbole surrounding cyberpunk and contests that it is merely a new location for 1980s conservatism. She compares the difference between authors like Gibson, who write the future with the gender dynamic they pretend the present has, with masculine techno-cowboys harnessing the feminized networks of technology, and authors like Atwood, who write a future where a scientific / technological situation combined with existing social conservatism to change the gender dynamic to the detriment of women. This article can be used to show that what happens to the imagined role of women within the future depends on who is doing the imagining. This can also be applied to the issue of ethnicity, as western science fiction typically imagines the future of American society. Some science fiction addresses the concern that Japanese technology was too prevalent in America, and the techno-cowboys of Gibson's imagining are exercising dominance over the Japanese hardware as well as the feminized networks. I would argue that while there exists the potential for cyberfeminist and multicultural futures, the majority of our published imagined futures are not going to reach that aim. The imagined future depends on who is doing the imagining, and as such, gender and ethnic identities matter when determining what that future looks like.
Bonus link for those who can access the library's collection of journals: Aboriginality in Science Fiction
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