Maiden, mother, chrome: feminist fictions of the female inhuman in American magazines, 1880-1936
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Lipperini, Rebecca Jean.
Maiden, mother, chrome: feminist fictions of the female inhuman in American magazines, 1880-1936. Retrieved from
https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-f3k4-g043Export
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TitleMaiden, mother, chrome: feminist fictions of the female inhuman in American magazines, 1880-1936
Date Created2020
Other Date2020-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (vi, 195 pages)
Description“Maiden, Mother, Chrome: Feminist Fictions of the Female Inhuman in American Magazines, 1880-1936” examines how middlebrow magazines in the U.S. wove together women, science, and fiction to produce a discourse on the female inhuman. This dissertation argues that despite the misogynist implications of dehumanizing women, the female inhuman is a contested site, used across ideological spectrums to varying results. Because these texts are frequently penned by minor authors and tend to be published in middlebrow magazines, these stories comprise an understudied archive in U.S. literary studies. Through extensive archive work, literary analysis, and cultural history, this dissertation excavates these fictions, and tells the story of a forgotten fad constellated around a permanent set of figures: the female machine, the worker bee, and the alien from outer space.
Although the trope of the machine, the hive, and the alien are instantly recognizable as science fiction tropes, this dissertation shows instead that these science fiction figures were in fact inherited from a middlebrow periodical context. Women writing for periodicals used these tropes in creative and unexpected ways during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which has been lost in the masculinization of SF. These texts are the earliest extent iterations of the trope, and they actively shape the genre in the decades that follow.
The figures of the female inhuman in the chapters that follow are a reaction against women’s exclusion from the category of the human, which, because it is perceived to be genderless, is in fact perceived to be male. For many of these texts, the logic of the human is not dismantled, merely shifted to allow for women’s inclusion. That being said, one contribution of this project is to look at moments of the embrace of the inhuman. In these tales, we can trace a genealogy of feminist thinking that imagines gender to be functional and artificial, which anticipates later feminist theories of gender as performance and as aesthetic.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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