Femspec Articles

The world of SF is introduced for a complex female character in the form of the maternal shape-shifter, Anyanwu. Butler’s depiction of womanhood through Anyanwu defamiliarizes the construction of women in science fiction.

Batya Weinbaum describes her experience with teaching the Joanna Russ' The Female Man and We Who Are About To… to students three decades after publication.

Sharon had discovered the encampment of women and children living under the cardboard packing boxes quite by accident one day when she had stepped into a booth in the hallway of the mall marked “DIAL A BREAST.” Just what had she discovered? Sharon's life was about to change but she didn't know that yet.

This is a review of a meeting that took place during a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People from across the country gathered to discuss the progress of the FEMSPEC journal and how they became interested in working on it. Ideas for future editions were also discussed.

I take a deep breath and look inside myself. If neither “hetero” nor "homo” forms of love have created wisdom, then what is to be the new archetype of love within which true wisdom can be born? Should I become a separatist lesbian; is that the politically smart thing to do? From the Introduction to the Motherhood Issue. Also included is the fictional story Faster Than My Girl Does.

A girl's SF by a nine year old in 1961 is a young work that FEMSPEC sometimes includes. Since “girls have the same fantasies of omni potence and infinite transformation boys do,” a nine year old girl shows the early attention to the joys of space invasion.Her "found" fiction contains three yellow people: Sunny, Beamer, and Ray, aliens equipped with an English dictionary.

Mexico provides a surreal surrounding for painters to experience new visions. Tichenor's artistic conceptions are not European. The artist makes an analogy about past practices of shamans and unexplainable phenomena in her art work. Her artwork glows in a radiating way that is un-natural. Tichenor's revealing artwork lets us see ordinary human beings unmasked.

A doctoral candidate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve covers the Third International Congress on sex and gender held at Oxford University. She discusses intersexual individuals reported on by Lee Anderson Brown of Sydney, and explores sources that might inspire artistic representations of gender that might be more experimental for creators of future gender bending sci fi works.

Judith Laura's novel, Goddess Spirituality for the 21st Century, and Treena Kortje's novel, Variations of Eve, are discussed. Laura is claimed to have spent a great deal of time and effort searching for original gender classifications in the bible. Kortje's novel describes many possible stories of Eve and the garden of Eden.

You see, no one at The College, an all purpose label for the small, religious, liberal arts college at which until recently I was tenure track will discuss any reasons why I am in my last year. Considering all the evidence of my outstanding performance, I was stunned and devastated when I got a curt letter of non-renewal.

Discussions of the politics of science fiction literature often consider gender, sexuality, race, class, and, more recently, disability; age, however, is far less present within science fiction and science fiction criticism. Few representations of old age spring to mind within the genre, particularly within written works of science fiction.

WisCon 22 and the Secret Feminist Cabal by William Clemente is a conference and convention coverage piece on pages 110 and 111.This convention at Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, Memorial Day Weekend, 1998, was for about 600 writers and readers of sf and feminism. As stated:"You don't just get feminism at WisCon, you get thoughtful social analysis" (110).

Using the concepts of Eutopia and Dystopia to describe the extremes of utopias, Brian Attebery's article "Women Alone, Men Alone: Single-Sex Utopias" examines the revivification of utopian fiction since the 1950s. By coining the term masculinist as a linguistic parallel to feminist, Attebery provides useful terms for discussion of utopia and gender in new ways.

Features an Exhibition Review titled "Half the Sky: Intersections in Social Practice Art, Shenyang, China, April 2014", a non-fiction essay, "To Live a New Life", and photomontage, "The Move to China Photomontage."

This is a review of a morning workshop, called "Writers' Respite," that took place a conference in Madison, Wisconsin. New SF writers were brought face to face with experienced writers in order to help guide them to future success.