Other advances in technology for sexual pleasure such as teledildonics.Male- and female-dominated societies, including single-gender worlds.
Reproductive technology including cloning, artificial wombs, parthenogenesis, and genetic engineering.Some of the themes explored in speculative fiction include: Science fiction has also depicted a plethora of alien methods of reproduction and sex. In fantasy, such features include figures (for example, mythological deities and heroic archetypes) who are not limited by preconceptions of human sexuality and gender, allowing them to be reinterpreted. In science fiction, such estranging features include technologies that significantly alter sex or reproduction. When the extrapolation involves sexuality or gender, it can force the reader to reconsider his or her heteronormative cultural assumptions the freedom to imagine societies different from real-life cultures makes science fiction an incisive tool to examine sexual bias. It provides science fiction with a quality that Darko Suvin has called “cognitive estrangement”: the recognition that what we are reading is not the world as we know it, but a world whose difference forces us to reconsider our own world with an outsider’s perspective. In speculative fiction, extrapolation allows writers to focus not on the way things are (or were), as non-genre literature does, but on the way things could be different. On the other hand, science fiction and fantasy can also offer more freedom than do non-genre literatures to imagine alternatives to the default assumptions of heterosexuality and masculine superiority that permeate many cultures. Sex is often linked to disgust in science fiction and horror, and plots based on sexual relationships have mainly been avoided in genre fantasy narratives. Science fiction in particular has traditionally been a puritanical genre oriented toward a male readership. ContentsĪs genres of popular literature, science fiction and fantasy often seem even more constrained than non-genre literature by their conventions of characterization and the effects that these conventions have on depictions of sexuality and gender. There also exists science fiction erotica, which explores sexuality and the presentation of themes aimed at inducing arousal. New Wave and feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which a variety of gender models and atypical sexual relationships are the norm, and depictions of sex acts and alternative sexualities became commonplace. In the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. Prior to the 1960s, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre speculative fiction. However, speculative fiction also offers the freedom to imagine societies different from real-life cultures, making it an incisive tool to examine sexual bias and forcing the reader to reconsider his or her cultural assumptions. Science fiction and fantasy have sometimes been more constrained than non-genre narrative forms in their depictions of sexuality and gender. Such elements may include depictions of realistic sexual interactions in a science fictional setting, a protagonist with an alternative sexuality, or exploration of the varieties of sexual experience that deviate from the conventional. Sexual themes are frequently used in science fiction or related genres.
The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. The Voice before the Void “Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction” Wikipedia Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS
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