Thawing The Snow Queen Essay

Thawing the Snow Queen; Feminism in Science Fiction Here’s the truth, women hate being society’s puppet; so Joan D. Vinge snipped her strings in the novel The Snow Queen. This author made Science Fiction into a tool. The genre allows controversial issues to be stripped and placed into a different setting; it probes the reader to reflect on his or her own beliefs--maybe even challenge those perceptions. Which is why Feminism could ripen under the pages of its wings. That ideology of equality certainly needed help lifting off; so this is what the author did. Vinge portrays feminism through characters’ strained relationships and epiphanies focused on equal rights. Equal rights meant melting the image of what people think a “man” or “woman” should be and combine them into one concept: human. That’s what feminism is about. It’s not about a “(…man …show more content…
It discuss how “science fiction has offered women a medium through which to explore their own sense of alienation within the genre itself and society at large”(…). Constant themes that seem to reoccur is the tossing of the patriarch, which this ruling of men was not only in literature but a reality as well. Women authors will defy the patriarch in a few common ways. Making it transparent, replacing it with a matriarch, or putting men in society under oppression (like the women felt they were under back then). “The question arises as to whether separatist feminist utopias are themselves contrained by the very gender assumption they seek to challenge. While the stratdgy of separatism liberates and empowers women, it has also been criscised for simply reproducing fixed categories of gender, and thus reinforcing essential notions of masculinity and femininity.” But overall, science fiction has been utilized throughout recent history to decay the wall of gender