Alien Constructions


Book Description

“An incisive critical work” that looks at Octavia Butler’s writing, the movies of the Matrix and Alien series—and more—through a feminist lens (Femspec). Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction’s potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist thewories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series. Patricia Melzer analyzes how these authors and films represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference, feminist critiques of science and technology, and the relationship among gender identity, body, and desire, including the new gender politics of queer desires, transgender, and intersexed bodies and identities. She demonstrates that key political elements shape these debates, including global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system; the impact of computer, industrial, and medical technologies on women’s lives and reproductive rights; and posthuman embodiment as expressed through biotechnologies, the body/machine interface, and the commodification of desire. Melzer’s investigation makes it clear that feminist writings and readings of science fiction are part of a feminist critique of existing power relations—and that the alien constructions (cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids) that populate postmodern science fiction are as potentially empowering as they are threatening.




Social Construction in Context


Book Description

This latest book by one the world's leading protagonists in the field will be welcomed not just by psychologists but by students, academics and professionals interested in social constructionism across a wide range of subjects. Social Construction in Context explores the potentials of social constructionist theory when placed in diverse intellectual and practical contexts. It demonstrates the achievements of social constructionism, and what it can now offer various fields of inquiry, both academic, professional and applied, given the proliferation of the theory across the social sciences and humanities.







An Invitation to Social Construction


Book Description

This new edition of Kenneth J. Gergen’s celebrated text An Invitation to Social Construction is now even more accessible for students, offering a clear and thorough introduction to one of the most significant movements in contemporary social science. The Third Edition includes: updates reflecting the many new developments in theory, research, and practice a more student-friendly, personal writing style three new chapters on education, and therapy and health care, and organizations key insights into how social construction can help support you in your research projects, from start to finish. An Invitation to Social Construction is the must-read text for all social science students, academics and practitioners wishing to learn about social constructionism, along with the forms of inquiry and practice central to its impact.




Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures


Book Description

Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures explores how contemporary Japanese female speculative fiction writers have challenged historical inequalities of sex, gender difference, and family roles by imagining alternative worlds where sexes are fluid and childbearing crosses the boundaries of male/female, biological/bioengineered, and human/nonhuman.




Construction


Book Description




The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Six (Cauldron, Steel Egg)


Book Description

The sixth book in The Complete Aliens Omnibus, an essential collection for fans of Twentieth Century Fox's iconic blockbuster action-packed science fiction film Aliens, comprised of Cauldron and Steel Egg. CAULDRON by Diane Carey On the spaceship Umiak, an elite troupe of cadets is forced into servitude by an unscrupulous captain taking the ship to a smuggler's rendezvous. During the transaction aboard the eerily silent Virginia, the cadets unwittingly transport an unexpected cargo: a hive of hibernating aliens. As the aliens begin to awake, a terrifying battle erupts between the cadets, the smugglers, the captain, and the emergent monsters. The cadets soon realize that in space, no one can hear them scream. STEEL EGG by John Shirley Before Ripley, there was a first encounter. Someone on Earth knew about the aliens. Someone battled them, and survived. Aliens and humans have fought before. When a human spaceship discovers a vast egg-shaped vessel in Saturn's orbit, they zero in to investigate the anomaly. They force their way aboard, finding evidence of an advanced civilization of peaceful creatures, now eradicated by an unknown foe. Three teams split up to explore the ship. But already the aliens have awoken. The first of all the battles unfolds...




Construction Site for Possible Worlds


Book Description

Perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art on how to envisage the construction site of possible worlds. Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produces an aggressively normative “official reality,” the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are thought, constructed, and instantiated, forcefully seeking to overcome the contemporary moment's deficit of conceptualizing alternate realities—its apparent fear of imagining possible new and compelling futures—to begin the arduous task of producing the political dynamics necessary for actual construction. Implicit in this dynamic between the imaginary and the possible is the question of how thinking intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies and structures of the world. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no confidence in any given that could guarantee our labors, how do we even envisage the construction site(s) of possible worlds, and with what kind of diagrams, tools, and languages can we bring them into being?







Globalization on the Line


Book Description

The essays in Globalization on the Line criticize the almost exclusive emphasis on the ethnically constituted trans-nation, whose function as an instrument of de-nationalization has become signified in the metaphorical use of 'the border.' Contributors focus on the surge of a more diverse variety of cultural forms of citizenship in response to the dramatic change that the geographies of U.S. border areas have undergone and simultaneously held to shape at the end of the 20th century. In its attempt to move beyond examinations of de-nationalized diasporic formations at the border, several essays in the collection add an attention to the northern frontier a hemispheric perspective that was originally spawned by imagining new forms of citizenship within U.S.- Mexico transborder cultures. Instead of viewing globalization and nation-states as two separate and opposed domains of theorization and politics, Globalization on the Line contextualizes U.S. borders within global processes that are currently reconstituting the relationship between nation-states and private corporations at the site of U.S. borders. The volume thus adds to the almost exclusive focus on the counter-hegemonic diasporic trans-nation an emphasis on various forms of citizenship that have emerged in response to increasingly more globally organized entities and practices.