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From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents

September 2023

DOI:10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 978-981-99-2026-6

Authors:

Prince of Songkla University

This book illuminates how science fiction studies can support diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and engineering. Shortly before science fiction got its name, a new paradigm connected whiteness and masculinity to the advancement of civilization. In order to show how science fiction authors supported the social construction of these gender and racial norms – and also challenged them – this study analyzes the impact of three major editors and the authors in their orbits: Hugo Gernsback; John W. Campbell, Jr.; and Judith Merril. Readers gain insights into fighting prejudice, the importance of the community, and ideas about how to challenge racism, sexism, and xenophobia in new creative work. Available now from https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3

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September 2023

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Book

Veils and Daggers: A Century of National Geographic's Representation of the Arab World

January 2000

Linda Steet

National Geographic magazine is an American popular culture icon that, since its founding in 1888, has been on a nonstop tour classifying and cataloguing the peoples of the world. With more than ten million subscribers, National Geographic is the third largest magazine in America, following only TV Guide and Reader's Digest. National Geographic has long been a staple of school and public ... [Show full abstract] libraries across the country. In Veils and Daggers, Linda Steet provides a critically insightful and alternative interpretation of National Geographic. Through an analysis of the journal's discourses in Orientalism, patriarchy, and primitivism in the Arab world as well as textual and visual constructions of Arab men and women, Islam, and Arab culture, Veils and Daggers unpacks the ideological perspectives that have guided National Geographic throughout its history. Drawing on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial criticism, Steet generates alternative readings that challenge the magazine's claims to objectivity. In this fascinating journey, it becomes clear that neither text nor image in the magazine can be regarded as natural or self-evident and she artfully demonstrates that the act of representing others "inevitably involves some degree of violence, decontextualization, miniaturization, etc." The subject area known as Orientalism, she shows, is a man-made concept that as such must be studied as an integral component of the social, rather than the natural or divine world. Veils and Daggers repositions and redefines National Geographic as an educational journal. Steet's work is an important and groundbreaking contribution in the area of social construction of knowledge, social foundations of education, educational media, and social studies as well as racial identity, ethnicity, and gender. Once encountered, readers of National Geographic will never regard it in the same manner again. Author note: Linda Steet is Assistant Professor of Social Foundation of Education and Co-Coordinator of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Flint.

Article

Essentialism Is Dead! Long Live Essentialism: Doctor Who Season [Femspec 19.2]

December 2019

Chris Leslie

At the end of 2017, the Christmas special of Doctor Who, a long-running television program on the British Broadcasting Corporation, concluded with the body of the title character transforming from male to female. The transformation of the Doctor was not a new idea; since 1966, the program's fictional setting stipulated that the main character's impending death could trigger a sort of ... [Show full abstract] reincarnation known as regeneration. For at least thirty years, it has been suggested that the Doctor's regeneration could result in a change of sex. Nevertheless, until "Twice Upon a Time," all of the actors who portrayed the Doctor since 1963 were male. Maybe it was easy to pretend that Doctor Who was always open to fluid notions of gender while watching the Doctor and his companion spar about their friendships and love interests, but unsurprisingly there was some robust sexism when the program first appeared in 1963. As a foil to the modern characters, the first Doctor's bias against women is on full display in "Twice Upon a Time." The actor who played the Doctor in the original black and white television series, William Hartnell, died in 1975. A new actor, David Bradley, reprised his role. Both he and the Capaldi, the twelfth doctor, offer a refrain of being unwilling to change. The duet of voices fearful of change built to a cathartic appearance of the first female actor to portray the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, in the closing of the episode. The fearful sentiment of the first and the twelfth Doctors has been previously expressed by science fiction fandom in in general.

Book

Racismes, Sexismes

January 2017

Chapter

Covid-19 as a symptom of another disease

December 2021

Cathryn van Kessel

How we define a problem affects how we deal with our struggles at the time as well as how we imagine possible futures unfolding. Covid-19 is indeed a problem in itself as a virus, but its exacerbated impact on specific communities in the United States (and elsewhere) lays bare a different disease: intersecting (Crenshaw, 1991) systemic violence such as ableism, ageism, classism, racism, sexism, ... [Show full abstract] and xenophobia (Hankivsky & Kapilashrami, 2020). Examples of this situation are: disproportionate deaths of those in Latinx and Black communities, exacerbated economic precarity of Black communities, anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia, and inattention to emergency situations within Indigenous communities. Social studies scholar Avner Segall (1999) aptly noted that “it is not the repetitive past we ought to fear (for the past never repeats itself) but, rather, the legacy of the past in our present” (p. 366). Furthermore, as educators explore these legacies, there can be a sense of “frozen futurism” where the assumption is “that the future will always be more of this, a perpetual unfolding of more and more of this” and it feels like the future “has already happened” (Smith, 2000, p. 17). The Covid-19 pandemic has illuminated some of the legacies left by the interlocking structural violence that persists in countries like (but not limited to) the United States and Canada (Solnit, 2020), and, yet, how might educators teach this situation in a way that can “recover a future that truly is a future; that is, a condition that is actually open” (Smith, 2000, p. 17)? With those considerations in mind, this chapter will consider the interlocking systemic violence highlighted by the current pandemic, as well as how the concepts of heroification (e.g., Loewen, 2007) and villainification (van Kessel & Crowley, 2017) are helpful in relation to engaging students in thinking about the underlying causes of these avoidable deaths. Such an approach is paired with explicit futures thinking and scenario reasoning (i.e., considering possible, probable, and preferable future scenarios) to encourage student feelings of agency to demand urgent institutional and social change (den Heyer, 2017).