ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by tracing a brief history of utopia as criticism, a discipline which addresses the planetary character of utopia, crossing national borders and global interests. The next section offers a genealogy of early women’s utopian fiction globally, an extract of which is featured in this proposal. It then makes a brief account of some trends in women’s SF that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, explaining the different relationships that France, Spain, Italy, and the UK had with SF from that period onwards. It ends by providing an overview of the many anti-racist and pro-inclusive groups currently at large in SF, the struggles they face, and the reasons they give for engaging with a genre that is widely considered to be white and male and can still be highly discriminatory.
