Close Encounters

Critical interpretations of science fiction are rare, especially science fiction as represented in film, television and other nonliterary media, and this book aims to fill this void. Ranging from historical analysis and interpretation to psychoanalytic analyses common in film study, and from avant-garde films to television sitcoms, the volume addresses science fiction thematically in terms of what the editors call "sexual difference". Historically, science fiction has been concerned with problems of difference - human and nonhuman as well as male and female. It has also constructed new categories of masculinity and femininity through the shifting, ambiguous and contradictory sexual status it assigns in the more unusual, genre-specific contexts, such as encounters with a sexual aliens, robots or androids. This volume aims to demonstrate the last decade's reworking of semiology, psychoanlysis and reception theory by feminist media theorists as they have contributed to the understanding of these new worlds.