[ecrea] Call for Papers – Special Issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on the female astronaut on screen

With apologies for cross-posting, colleagues may be interested in the 
following call for papers for a special journal issue on the female 
astronaut on screen:

*Call for Papers – Special Issue of /Science Fiction Film and Television
/Guest Editors: Lorrie Palmer and Lisa Purse*

*“When the Astronaut is a Woman: Beyond the Frontier in Film and 
Television”**
*
With the release of /Hidden Figures/ (Melfi, 2016), public perception of 
the iconic era of the space race was reconfigured. The central image of 
the white male astronaut was replaced by one in which women of color 
dominated mathematics, science, and technology, thereby prompting a new 
cultural conversation. Indeed, this narrative of science fact signals 
another significant re-embodiment in our science fictions: the female 
astronaut.

Spaceflight and the astronauts who embark on mythic journeys of 
exploration have long been in the shadow of the macho military test 
pilots of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. These men evoke 
nostalgia through their Right Stuff swagger, their personae as space 
race Cold Warriors, and as a collective Kennedy-esque metaphor for the 
American frontier. In the postwar decades of space travel, “the body of 
the astronaut [was] increasingly used as a projection screen for 
anxieties concerning the stability of gender categories” (Brandt 2006), 
so it is significant that recent iterations are moving beyond the 
traditional white male astronaut. We see this in the diversification of 
representations of space travelers in television and fiction film, 
particularly along the lines of gender, race and sexuality, as 
corporations race to Mars with crowd-sourced crews, and entertainment 
media revise cultural narratives about space exploration.

This special issue of /Science Fiction Film and Television/,//therefore, 
seeks to integrate this contemporary moment of challenge to the 
hegemonic imagery of space travel by examining the genre’s aesthetic and 
representational characteristics and their relation to wider cultural 
discourses around gender, race, technology and ecology, and to 
theoretical debates about the body, technoscience and the post-human.

Along these lines, contributors may wish to re-evaluate depictions of 
female astronauts in films like /Contact/ (1997), /Solaris/ 
(2002),/Event Horizon/ (1997), or /Supernova/ (2000), or to map more 
contemporary representational trends in films such as /Interstellar/ 
(2014), /The Martian/ (2015), the /Star Wars/ or/Star Trek/ reboots, or 
Ripley’s legacy in the recent installments of the /Aliens/ franchise. 
Television series like /Dark Matter/ (2015-), /Ascension/ (2014), /The 
Expanse/ (2015-), or the new /Star/ /Trek: Discovery/ (2017-) would be 
of particular interest to this special issue. At the heart of these 
texts are female astronaut-protagonists who must negotiate their 
relationship to the legacy of existing depictions of space exploration, 
while also speaking to their contemporary context. Ultimately then, we 
ask how the reconfiguration of space race history—now made visible in 
/Hidden Figures/—broadens the frontier of science fiction scholarship.

Please send proposals by 30 September 2017 to Lorrie Palmer, 
(lpalmer /at/ towson.edu) <mailto:(lpalmer /at/ towson.edu)> and to Lisa Purse, 
(l.v.purse /at/ reading.ac.uk) <mailto:(l.v.purse /at/ reading.ac.uk)> with an 
author’s bio and a short (5-7 entries) bibliography.

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