Episode Seven: Women in Space/Making Space for Women

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This week we are talking about women in space. How have space movies imagined women’s participation in space exploration and travel? Our cultural imaginaries have not always made space for women in space – despite the early SF positioning of women as part of humanity’s journey to the stars, much of contemporary SF see women as support for the male mastery of technologies and machines. We talk about #WomenMakeSF movies Aniara a Swedish SF directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, Claire Denis’ English language debut High Life alongside key examples like Gravity, Interstellar, and Alien.

@WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSF #WomenMakeSFPod

Intro/Outro music: Inspire Glitches (2017) by Yuriy Shishlov (CC-BY-NC-SA)

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MENTIONS

• Reviews for Aniara and High Life
• Quote: “Our cultural imaginary has often struggled to find a place for the female astronaut due to the persistence of a normative, and normatively policed, gender binary, leaving the women who play astronauts in sf as well as the remarkable real-life women who have finally become astronauts to bridge fiction and reality.” (Lorrie Palmer and Lisa Purse 2019: 5)
• Special edition on Science Fiction Film and TV on female astronauts
• Nasa cancels all-female spacewalk, citing lack of spacesuit in right size (The Guardian, 2019)
• Katee Sackhoff in Another World (2019)
• Amy has written about Tilly from Star Trek Discovery in the Liverpool University Press collection on the series: Fighting for the Future: Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (2020)
• HOME Cinema, Manchester
• Amy wrote a post about the course she taught on Women in SF at HOME in 2019
• Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972)
• Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Generation ships 
• Compare the Aniara ship to the Axiom in WALL·E (2008)
• Leonora Crichlow (Annie in Being Human [not Humans] and Billie in Avenue 5)
• The Goblet of Fire (2005)
• Sparkly Vampire Franchise – Youtube: Robert Pattinson Makes Fun of the Twilight Saga
• Cosmopolis (2012)
• 2014 Dior Homme advertising campaign with Robert Pattinson The Film; The Pool; The Elevator; Behind the Scenes Video
• Obsidian Implants in Supergirl
• The Girl Who Was Plugged In (James Tiptree, Jr., 1974) 
• Zoom Fatigue is Worse for Women (Forbes, 2021)
• Reverie (2019)
• Valentina Tereshkova: “When you are up there, you are homesick for Earth as your cradle. When you get back, you just want to get down and hug it.” The First Woman in Space (The Guardian, 2017)
• Women incur a disproportionate burden of institutional service and pastoral care. Gender, COVID and Faculty Service (Inside Higher Ed, 2020)
• Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries
• Criminal Minds (2005-2020)
• Janelle Monáe plays an android called Alice in an episode of called ‘Autofac’ in Electric Dreams (2018) an anthology tv series based on Philip K. Dick short stories. Alice is a black robot informing whites they are essentially consumer slaves. Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams: ‘Autofac’ Looks at the Dark Side of Robotics (IGN, 2018)
• A.L.I.E. in The 100 is a sentient AI who is designed to make the life of human’s better, but in order to save them she calculates that the population needs to be much lower and launches a deadly nuclear strike.
• High-Rise (J. G. Ballard, 1975) and High Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015) – Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level (The Guardian, 2015)
• Silent Running (1972)
• Algae Bioreactor – the future of food in space? (SyFy Wire, 2019) – no word on algae coffee, yet.
• Soylent Green (1973)
• We also talked about Killjoys (Lucy the ship) and Vagrant Queen (Winnipeg the ship, and the Winnie Bot) on Episode Three: Women Make SF TV (aka stop cancelling my shows)
• Amy and Lyle’s article on AI and imagined futures of education
• How Do Women Deal With Having a Period … in Space? (NatGeo, 2016)
• The “Oracle of Omaha” Warren Buffett – come and invest in us
• Hidden Figures (2016)
• Meet the Rogue Women Astronauts of the 1960s Who Never Flew (Smithsonian Magazine, 2017)
• The Sad, Sad Story of Laika, the Space Dog, and Her One-Way Trip into Orbit (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018)
• Why Michael’s Braids Are Such A Big Deal (Women at Warp, 2020)
• Women’s Six Nations 2021
• Kit that Fits: Developing Women’s Sportswear