ABSTRACT
This brief chapter introduces readers to the history of theoretical approaches to gender and science fiction (SF). Serious, sustained inquiry into these issues emerged in the 1960s and 70s, with the concurrent rise of SF scholarship and the revival of feminism and other progressive politics. The first two generations of feminist SF scholars channeled the energy of newly established gender studies programs across academia to identify the patriarchal literary and cultural constraints limiting explorations of sex and gender in SF and to celebrate the lost history of women in SF as well as the recent emergence of a distinct feminist SF. Since the 1990s, scholars interested in the relations of gender and genre have focused their inquiries through new theoretical frames including science studies, critical race theory, media studies, queer theory, disability studies, and animal studies to continue the process of recovering SF by women and queer authors and to show how contemporary SF authors increasingly replace old notions of personhood based on binary sexual and species identity with generous new ones based on the entanglement of all living organisms.
