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Helen Merrick

Document Type

Article

Abstract

“Alien(ating) Naturecultures” examines the potential of feminist science fictions to act as “cross-cultural” narratives in encounters between the humanities and sciences. Merrick argues that the conjunction of disciplines figured by the term “science fiction” bears re-examination as a resource for science studies, and a potential mediator in science-humanities dialogues.

Specifically, Merrick asks, when we are concerned with critiquing and unpacking technoscientific practices, cultures and knowledges, what can more creative forms such as science fiction (sf) offer? Such questions about “naturecultures” are intimately connected to the ways we construct and understand “life,” the “human” and difference in the discourses of Science. In particular, Merrick wants to consider how feminist and ecofeminist sf might contribute to (and complicate) these complex questions, focusing on the possibilities inherent in human/other confusions. A number of recent eco/feminist sf texts utilize the figure of the alien as a means of interrogating notions of the “human,” “non-human” and our definitions of “life itself.” In these texts, confrontations between human and other are ripe with possibilities for denaturalizing the boundaries and allegiances which infuse traditional depictions of the human/non-human dichotomy. Along with Haraway and other feminist critics of science, Merrick views feminist sf as uniquely suited to re-thinking the contested terrain of “nature” as it is complexly and paradoxically mapped out by both the life sciences and humanities. In the move to re-interrogate problematic inscriptions of the nature/culture binary, Merrick argues that narratives such as eco/feminist sf can be seen as vital engagements with science: in short, as a “creative science studies.”

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