Three academic talks:
Jennifer Zwahr-Castro: Author and Character Gender in the Hugos
From 2001-2020, over half of Hugo winners in this category have been women. The current study is a first step in a more nuanced understanding of gender representation among nominees in the best novel category and the central characters portrayed in those works.
Nick Hubble: Where Will it All Lead?: Gwyneth Jones’s Life
I compare Gwyneth Jones’s novel, Life, with Marie Stopes’s Love’s Adventure, the novel to which Virginia Woolf repeatedly alludes (Chloe and Olivia) in A Room of One’s Own. I examine how Jones’s novel imagines the ending “of the great project” in which Anna is free both to “like Olivia” and to run her own lab.
Marcia D. Nichols: Gynoids, Fembots, and other Mechanized Women
A mainstay of science fiction, gynoids and other mechanized women wreak havoc on the masculinist order. I will trace the history of the gynoid from her roots in 18th century science and literature into the 20th century in order to provide a feminist critique of the traditional use of the gynoid as a projection of fear.