ABSTRACT
Subjectivity refers to the notion that everyone is a subject, that is, that everyone has some sense of self. In practice, Western cultures have been inconsistent and even arbitrary in recognizing who has subjectivity and in damning others to less than human status. Women, LGBTQ people, and people of colour have often been denied subjectivity and rendered unable to tell their own stories. SF allows us to think of subjectivity more expansively and to imagine not only that the marginalized in our own world might have subjecthood, but so might others entirely, like aliens and androids. The chapters in this section look at the ways in which gender affects people’s access to subjectivity, whether because the protagonists are women or trans people, or because they change sex/gender over the course of the narrative, or because they involve alien species with no gender or multiple genders. As the SF world becomes both more diverse and more global, we will continue to see works from around the world that think seriously about gender and imagine ways in which it might be different. However we imagine the future of gender and the challenges and changes we might wish to enact, it is certain that questions of gendered subjectivity will remain central to science fiction.
