Performing the Technologies of Gender: Representations of Television in Science Fiction by Women
2008; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoICFA Guest Scholar Address 2007 her essay, teresa de lauretis theorized that gender, both representation and self-representation, is not only product ... institutionalized discourses but also of various social technologies, such cinema (2). this essay, I argue that pulp magazines and succeeding science fiction, women writers have literalized this connection through depiction television technology gender. I examine short stories by Clare Winger Harris, C. L. Moore, and James Tiptree, Jr. (a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon), well later feminist sf film, Making Mr. Right, directed by Susan Seidelman, and Melissa Scott's novel, Kindly Ones, placing them dual contexts historical development television and history women's science fiction and its representation gender. (1) these science fictions by women, ideologies gender are literalized descriptions television an apparatus that constructs gender through representing it. (2) first science fiction story by woman pulp science fiction magazines, Clare Winger Harris's The Fate Poseidonia, published 1927, featured new device. Television, the electrical transmission and reception transient visual images (Abramson, Invention 13), dependent on brain's fooling itself with persistence vision (Burns 63), was result nineteenth-century hope for communication device such telegraph or telephone extended to visual representation--like today's cell phone rather than today's television. information about this new invention may have come to Harris through editor, Hugo Gernsback, who sponsored contest that her story won: In December 1923, [Charles Francis] Jenkins demonstrated his television apparatus separately to Hugo Gernsback, editor News, and Watson Davis, editor Popular Radio (Abramson, Invention 19). Newspapers across United States reported Charles Jenkins's further success June 1925, transmitting an image windmill from Anacostia, Maryland, five miles, to Washington, DC (Abramson, Invention 22), and American Telephone and Telegraph Company's public demonstration on April 7, 1927, transmitting program from Washington, DC to New York City (Abramson, Invention 23). Harris's story was published two months later. While Gernsback may have been influenced choosing story contest winner because its use television, Harris herself deploys television not to celebrate progress science, but rather to frame her tale and to represent technologies gender her generation constructed them. Harris's prize-winning science fiction recounts tale discarded boyfriend, George Gregory, who is suspicious his ex-girlfriend's new male escort, Martell, so that eventually Gregory eavesdrops on Martell only to find that he is using device to communicate with other aliens plot to steal water from Earth for Mars. whole story is obsessed with visual technologies twentieth century: it opens with lantern-slide show views Mars (a parlor entertainment popularized during 1890s). This program frames Mars culture inferior to Gregory's Earth: the telescopic eye, when turned on Mars, sees waning world (246). Martell strikes George utterly alien, and to us readers, name indicates again Harris's anxiety about new communication devices: Mar-tell, charactonym, suggests alien's duplicitous character and his possession dangerous communication technology. When George peers into Martell's apartment through keyhole, he sees alien using weird instrument, perhaps a newfangled radio that communicated with spirit world (247). story is set future where television has been in use for generation, but, George reflects, as yet no instrument had been invented which delivered messages from 'unknown bourne'! …
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