TEKNOWOMEN
ROCKET (WO)MAN Part of the BFI’s Days of Fear and Wonder programme, GFT’s upcoming Teknowomen fi lm season explores the depiction of women in science fi ction. Film critic Hannah McGill ponders gender roles and sexual politics in the genre
T hose of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s might reasonably have expected social friction about gender roles to be a matter for the history books by the unimaginably futuristic 21st century. Surely all that was going to be sorted out, along with world peace and freely available jetpacks? As it turns out, however, things don’t always progress in a linear fashion. Just as little girls have been forcefully beckoned away from trains, dungarees and Meccano towards old-school femininity of pink frills and princess fantasies, so the right of women to participate in, inl uence and comment on various areas of social and artistic endeavour has turned into a problem for a whole new generation of chauvinists.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the internet, and most specii cally in the world of gaming. There, critiquing the inarguable tendency for female characters to be sidelined / objectii ed / slain while also being a woman yourself is liable to earn you an onslaught of vividly sexualised death threats from inadequate troglodytes who still blame all women for that time a cheerleader turned them down for a prom date. So the most socially transformative scientii c innovation of a generation, if not several, is fostering a whole new breed of violent misogyny; and that same generation’s dei nitive new creative and entertainment form (gaming) i nds its most committed users and creators divided over gender
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issues. Interesting times, then, to look at how future and technology- focused i lms have historically portrayed female characters, and addressed female viewers. Is sci-i a basically masculine domain, as we imply when we speak casually of a sci-i blockbuster as a ‘boys’ i lm’? Have sci-i movies proffered progressive portrayals of women, or did some of them help to foster the extreme gender-paranoia currently found among the male ‘geeks’ of the online world? And is the male sci-i geek such a powerful stereotype simply because it’s accurate, or because female sci-i fandom is underestimated or overlooked? Come to that, is it alarming that we still refer to gender in binary terms, when most of us recognise that it’s never been that simple? It’s not just current confused and confusing messages about gender, fandom, technology and progress that make the upcoming Teknowomen i lm season so interesting. From its very inception, science i ction has been much concerned with relationships between males and females. Reproduction and sex being the socially fraught matters that they are, visions of possible futures often imagine different attitudes to them. It has historically suited sci-i , as a populist commercial genre, both to indirectly address contemporary controversies, and to play up scandalous and titillating elements; so, sex and sexual politics have often played