Toija Cinque There is something darkly broken yet emotionally beautiful about Rey. Like a pair of wings, she carries proudly the troubles of her past and present on her back. Still young, Rey was orphaned as a child, left behind on the planet Jakku, ascribing her disposition as disenfranchised and a seeming outsider (McKnight, 2016).…
Will Brooker I went into Star Wars with an attitude like Han Solo’s: cynical, jaded, an impress-me air. I came out more like Luke Skywalker: invigorated, thrilled, wide-eyed from my vision of a new world. I say Star Wars. I mean Star Wars; just Star Wars, with no Roman numerals or subtitles before and after.…
Alicia Byrnes, New York University | In her seminal essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’ Donna Haraway adopts the cyborg as a feminist icon because it undermines the identity-related binaries governing patriarchal order. Irrespective of the merit of Haraway’s theory, films such as The Island of Lost Souls…
Rebecca Johnston | She Was a Beauty in a Cage responds to the prompt of ‘gender issues in science fiction for children and young adults’. I wrote it in response to a real life experience that gave me cause to reflect on pervasive gender issues in our society which also exist in the media we consume…
Lenise Prater | Andrew Milner has recently argued that fantasy and science fiction (and utopia) are ‘cognate’ genres: “above all, because they are each tales of wonder” (44). He adds that this is an argument for analysing fantasy ‘in addition to and alongside’ science fiction (198). It is precisely the element of ‘wonder’, the ‘non-realistic’…
Elyce Helford | Though the present and future of post-millennial American science fiction television varies greatly from program to program, all are arguably driven by a melting-pot white ethic that reveals gains for white women and far less for people of color, especially African American women. While programming remains overwhelmingly produced by white men, white…