November 18 marks Margaret Atwood’s birthday. The Oryx and Crake author writes on a variety of genres, including science fiction.
Wiki Education has been focusing on women scientists this year as part of our Year of Science. But when it comes to inspiring women to engage in the fields of science and technology, there’s no denying that science fiction has a role to play in the popular imagination. We’ve highlighted the great work from students in Dr. Ximena Gallardo C’s course on Octavia E. Butler in the past.
This week, we’re looking at Carol A. Stabile’s Feminist Science Fictions course at the University of Oregon, which encourages her students to explore and share this perspective on science and speculative fiction.
Students developed the article on James Tiptree, Jr., the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, who was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. Sheldon used a masculine pen name from 1967 until her death in 1987, and only revealed her true identity in 1977. She explained her reason for using the assumed name in a 1983 interview: “I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”
Students contributed an article about the collection, Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson, which draws on Hopkinson’s background in Afro-Caribbean culture. They also wrote about Joanna Russ, a science fiction author who also published scholarly feminist criticism of pornography.
If you’d like to read more about feminist science fiction, you’re in luck. Students edited the article on Feminist science fiction.
The information these students shared for this course has been accessed more than 275,000 times! Thanks to these students for their great contributions to Wikipedia.
Photo: Modified from Margaret Atwood star on Canada’s Walk of Fame by Tabercil, Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0.
